by Andrew Lane
‘And a whole load of pain and grief,’ Natalie added in a heartfelt voice, ‘not to mention the heart-stopping tension, but don’t worry about that.’
CHAPTER
twenty
Calum realized that the team was still alive when their headbands came back to life simultaneously.
He had been on the verge of calling the British embassy in Tbilisi to report them missing. His hand had actually been resting on the phone when his screens suddenly lit up. Each screen showed their faces – Rhino, Natalie, Tara and Gecko – as they all stood in a circle, looking at each other. Gecko’s face was scratched, but apart from that they all looked OK, thank God. They seemed to have recovered their rucksacks, and at least two of them were holding mobile phones. In fact, Natalie was making a call as Calum watched – probably, he thought with a pang of guilt, to her mother. That was still a conversation he was going to have to have, and which he wasn’t looking forward to at all.
‘What happened?’ he cried. ‘I’ve been worried sick.’
‘Lots of things happened,’ Gecko replied. ‘Some of which we may even tell you about.’ He was smiling, as if at a private joke. In fact, they were all smiling.
Tara was looking around nervously. ‘Hey, I’ve just had a thought. What about the Nemor Incorporated expedition? The last thing we want right now is for them to turn up – especially after where we’ve been. Calum, do you know where they are?’
Where we’ve been? Her words sent a thrill through him. It sounded as if they had a story to tell, and he was desperate to hear it, but first . . .
He weighed the bugging device that he’d found beneath the desk in his hand. He had disconnected the battery as soon as he had found it, rendering it mute, but he could reconnect it in a few moments if he had to. And he thought he had just found a reason to do so.
‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I think I can send them on a wild goose chase. They’ve had my computer bugged – that’s how they were able to track you all, and how they got Natalie. They pulled your mobile-phone locations right from my system. Now I know what they’ve been doing, however, I can set some software running that will gradually distort your positions. When I switch the bug back on, it will faithfully transmit the wrong locations, and Nemor’s team will head off into the wilderness. I could keep this going until you’re all back here and they’re heading into Azerbaijan.’ He paused. ‘Did you . . . ?’ he started to ask, and then stopped. He wasn’t sure whether or not he wanted to know.
‘We’ll tell you after we’ve got back to civilization.’ Rhino smiled. ‘But first we have some negotiations to conduct. For now, we need to get back to Ruspiri, if only to stop the locals sending out a lynch mob.’ He glanced around at the other three. ‘Right – everyone back in the van. Calum – I’ll brief you later.’
‘OK,’ said Calum cautiously. He leaned back in his chair and watched as the circle broke up and they headed back to the van. ARLENE, he noticed, was still with them, trotting faithfully along with their equipment on its back.
As he relaxed, his gaze moved upward, to where one of his screens was showing a photograph that had just come in to the Lost Worlds website. It showed what at first glance was a scorpion, but this scorpion seemed to be swimming across a river, and judging by the size of the trees in the distance it was about two metres long.
He wondered how he was going to break the news to the team. He had a feeling that another expedition was on the cards.
AUTHOR’S
notes
Previously, when writing the Young Sherlock Holmes books which have kept me busy over the last couple of years, I’ve finished off by talking about historical influences, research sources and which of the characters in the book were real and which I had invented.
This book is different. It’s set in the present day, of course, which means that I didn’t have to do any historical research. What I did have to do was geographical research, mainly on Georgia, its capital city Tbilisi and the area around the Caucasus Mountains. I was fortunate enough to visit Georgia at the invitation of the Georgian publishers of the Young Sherlock Holmes books, and I spent a wonderful few days in Tbilisi and out in the countryside (including an incredible day trip to a real prehistoric cave village which I used as the basis for the Almasti village in the book). For that reason I would like to thank Bakur Sulakauri Books, and specifically Elene and Tata, for looking after me so well. Never have I eaten so much good food in such a short space of time. Who would have thought that walnut sauce could go with so many different dishes? Who would have thought that you could make a refreshing fizzy drink with tarragon leaves? And while on the subject of Bakur Sulakauri Books, I would like to express my thanks to Nino Demuria for helping out with character and place names.
There are influences on this book, of course, but they are more literary and descriptive than factually historical. When I was growing up, I read a lot of books by a writer named Willard Price. He wrote fourteen novels about two teenage zoologists named Hal and Roger Hunt, who travelled the world seeking out wild animals for zoos, circuses and wildlife parks. The first of the books, Amazon Adventure, was published in 1949, and the last, Arctic Adventure, in 1980. I loved those books, and the strong memories I have of them have provided at least some of the impetus for writing about the adventures of Calum Challenger. Of course, writing about a boy whose pastime is catching animals for zoos, circuses and wildlife parks would be pretty unacceptable to most people these days, so Calum had to have a different, and more ecological, aim in mind.
Calum’s interest in undiscovered animals is inherited, of course, from his great-grandfather Professor George Challenger. Like Sherlock Holmes, Professor Challenger was a character invented by the Victorian writer Arthur Conan Doyle. He appears in the novels The Lost World (1912), The Poison Belt (1913) and The Land of Mists (1926), plus the short stories ‘When the World Screamed’ (1928) and ‘The Disintegration Machine’ (1929). Although he obviously takes no part in this book, and in fact it doesn’t really matter to the plot whether Calum is related to him or not, I am grateful (again!) to the family of Arthur Conan Doyle for allowing me to make reference to him.
Going back to Willard Price – when he wasn’t writing adventure books he travelled on many expeditions to remote areas of the world for the National Geographic Society and the American Museum of Natural History. My father used to have a subscription to the society’s National Geographic Magazine, which arrived in our letter box every month filled with glossy colour photographs of various animals, landscapes and geographic features. Every couple of months there used to be a folded map included in the package. I still have some of those maps, including one brilliant one that showed all the underwater mountain ranges buried deep beneath the surface of the world’s various oceans. That really sparked my imagination. I learned an awful lot about the world from the National Geographic Magazine. In fact, I have my own subscription now, but it arrives wirelessly on my iPad, rather than in a thick envelope in the post. That’s progress for you.
Another magazine I have a wireless subscription to is the Fortean Times. That magazine focuses not on the real world, but the unreal one. It lists and discusses various phenomena from poltergeists to alien abductions to bizarre deaths, but it takes a relatively sceptical approach to what it reports, and it always tries to seek out genuine evidence rather than hearsay, anecdotes and stories. What I like most about the Fortean Times is its regular articles on strange creatures glimpsed in remote forests or appearing from the shadows outside small, isolated villages – creatures either unknown to science or, perhaps, thought to have died off many years ago. A lot of things that I have read in the Fortean Times have influenced the way that Calum Challenger thinks in this, and future, novels.
Off at a tangent, I spent a long time when I was younger collecting a set of books called the Dumarest series, written by E. C. Tubb. The books form a continuing science-fiction series about a man searching for the lost planet of Earth, travelling from world to w
orld collecting evidence that will help him find it (and picking up a lot of scars on the way). The Dumarest universe is pretty much alien-free and technology-light, and the books are more about the things one man has to do to survive in a series of hostile environments, and about the importance of integrity and honesty in a person’s life. E. C. Tubb died in 2010, but not before actually writing the last book in the series (which runs to thirty-two novels). I loved E. C. Tubb’s writing style. As a kind of tribute to him I recently decided to read all of the Dumarest books again, one after the other. I’m still going, but one thing I have learned (with some surprise) is that my writing style (if I have one) borrows quite a lot from E. C. Tubb’s. If you’re going to borrow, I suppose you should borrow from the best.
So, here we are. It’s November 2012, and I’ve just finished writing this book. In the next few days I’ll start writing the sixth Young Sherlock Holmes book, which I think is going to be called Stone Cold. Or possibly Knife Edge. When I’ve finished that, I’ll start work on the second Calum Challenger book. I have no idea what that’s going to be called, or what kind of strange creature it will involve, but I am looking forward to finding out.
I’ll see you then.
Andrew Lane
ABOUT
the author
Andrew Lane is the author of the bestselling Young Sherlock Holmes books. These have been published around the world and are available in thirty-seven different languages. Not only is he a lifelong fan of Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective, he is also an expert on the books and is the only children’s writer endorsed by the Sherlock Holmes Conan Doyle estate. Lost Worlds is inspired by another famous Conan Doyle novel, The Lost World. Andrew’s main character, Calum Challenger, is the grandson of Conan Doyle’s protagonist, Professor George Edward Challenger.
Andrew writes other things too, including adult thrillers (under a pseudonym), TV adaptations (including Doctor Who) and non-fiction books (about things as wide-ranging as James Bond and Wallace & Gromit). He lives in Dorset with his wife and son and a vast collection of Sherlock Holmes books, the first of which he found in a jumble sale over forty years ago.
Also by Andrew Lane
Young Sherlock Holmes: Death Cloud
Young Sherlock Holmes: Red Leech
Young Sherlock Holmes: Black Ice
Young Sherlock Holmes: Fire Storm
Young Sherlock Holmes: Snake Bite
First published 2013 by Macmillan Children’s Books
This electronic edition published 2013 by Macmillan Children’s Books
a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-1-4472-2803-5
Copyright © Andrew Lane 2013
The right of Andrew Lane to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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