by Greig Beck
He put the heavy coin on the table, pushed his long hair back, and leaned over it, studying it minutely. The side he looked at contained a human head, but with three faces. A king or kings, perhaps, he wondered.
There was writing around the outer edge, which he squinted at but couldn’t make out. He turned the coin over.
“Mother of mercy.”
The beast depicted was hideous and compelling at the same time. It was also familiar, and it nagged at his memory. The hulking thing had tendrils or tentacles hanging from a monstrous face with mesmeric gaze, and huge arms that ended in grasping claws.
“I’ve seen you before somewhere.” Matt rubbed his chin for a moment before he jumped up and headed toward his desk. He dragged out the top drawer and grabbed his magnifying glass. On the way back, he also took a few ancient leather-bound books from the shelf and then dropped back onto the couch.
Matt flipped open the largest of his books; it was an ancient cryptozoological text about mythical creatures from the past and present. He had an idea what he was looking for and quickly found it. He sat back.
“Dagon,” he whispered. “The slumberer beneath.”
Matt lunged forward and grabbed up the magnifying glass, focusing on the tiny lettering. He slowly began to grin—he didn’t recognize it, and therefore couldn’t read it. And that excited him even more.
Matt was one of the—if not the—top paleolinguists in the world, and if he didn’t recognize the writing, then no one would.
“A new language. Thank you, whoever you are.” He picked up the box again and pulled out the remaining cotton wool. Sure enough, there was a small note in the bottom. He read it.
The lost city in the crystal cave.
His mouth dropped open as he read the last sentence.
That exists at the center of the Earth.
CHAPTER 04
University of Alabama, Huntsville – Lecture Room M106 – today
Jane Baxter stood on the podium feeling right at home after two years away from teaching.
Back to my roots, thought the biology teacher, who had attained her doctorate specializing in evolutionary biology following her visit to the vast world at the center of the Earth—her secret, and her cross to bear.
But the legacy of her trip lived on, and she hiked the collar of her shirt a little higher to hide the lesions from the skin cancers that were forming on her neck. They also dotted her back, and as far as the oncologists were concerned, were untreatable, aggressive, and would eventually eat into her, just like they did to the old Russian woman, Katya Babikov.
She felt a twinge in her stomach as she knew that Mike Monroe was in an even worse condition than her—it seemed their curiosity, or stupidity, had a high and terrible price.
Jane pushed the morbid thoughts from her mind and inhaled the comforting smells of old wood, floor cleaner, and whiteboard marker. It was just what she needed to take her mind off the hand she and Mike had now been dealt.
Jane smiled as she heard the students start to fill up the theatre. There was a mix of murmuring, coughs, laughter, shuffling feet, and books being slammed down on desktops. Some were bright-eyed with enthusiasm, some slouched, and some were only here to draw a few extra university credits, or maybe just catch an extra hour of sleep after a heavy night.
It didn’t matter, she loved them all and had missed this. Because the job was more than rewarding—it was safe, secure, and in a way, it was the psychological iodine to apply to her mental wounds.
It had been a year since she and Mike had climbed out of the Gadime Cave in Kosovo. Everyone that had traveled with them had been lost, brutally, with the question mark still hanging over Harris and Ally who never surfaced. But they had to be dead. Had to be.
She and Mike were a couple now, and at first they had treated their ulcers with the remains of the red people’s salve he had kept—and it worked—but when it ran out, the cancers came back, bigger and hungrier for more of their flesh.
Just before Mike had left, one morning Jane had stood before her full-length mirror examining herself. Clothed, she could forget about the cancer as she and Mike both were still physically strong. But naked, her skin reminded her of a suit that the moths had gotten into and left tiny holes in the fabric.
Mike noticed and had smiled ruefully and said, “Looks like we’re going to be eaten alive after all.”
A horrible thing to say, she had told him. And immediately regretted it, as he was trying to lighten their predicament with humor. But it was horrible because it was so true. And she hated it.
I’ll never give up on us. I’ll fix this, he had told her. And then he had begged her to come with him to his cabin to be surrounded by nature, and not concrete, glass, smog, and shouted voices. She didn’t fight it because she understood it. But she didn’t go with him. Not yet, she thought.
Jane rubbed at one of the ulcers on her shoulder, sighed, and gave her lecture notes a crooked smile as she assembled them. Butterflies tickled in the pit of her stomach, and she breathed deeply. Focus, she demanded of herself, you need this. So, she sucked in a deep breath and scanned the title on her first page: The evolution of giants.
Her background in biology and what she’d been through had forced her to become an expert, and this was the way she expelled her demons—via a lecture room exorcism. She’d talk about it like it was a laboratory experiment, pretend that it happened to someone else, and keep putting distance between those horrifying events and the new Jane Baxter she was making today.
She checked her watch, 2:01 pm: go time. Jane knocked on the lectern to draw the room to silence and looked up at the rows of youthful faces—lots of them—a full house; there had to be a hundred and fifty people. Interest in her topic was gratifying.
Jane’s presentation was about gigantism brought about by evolution, and her presentation focused on the massive marine creatures of today and those from our world’s past, and long past, and how evolution would always fill a niche with whatever raw materials it could find.
She began. “In the beginning, there was the sea. And only the sea.” She hit keys to project a silent movie onto the screen behind her. “Let me take you back in time… to the warm waters of the Devonian period, some four hundred million years ago.”
The screen image first showed harsh sunshine on an endless expanse of water before it dove down to where curtains of light reached into the shallow depths.
“It was warm, mid-eighty degrees, and there were no polar ice caps, so the sea level was much higher than today. The oceans were vaster than at any other time. In effect, our Earth was a water world.”
The video rolled on, as if they were gliding through the empty water. Jane looked up briefly and saw the blue glow from the screen reflected on their youthful faces.
“Life on land didn’t exist at the beginning of the Devonian. But down below, the creatures of the vast oceans exploded in diversity. And when there are few predators, creatures thrive and grow big. But eventually, the predators respond by also growing huge to be able to prey on them.”
The film then showed a trilobite, its multiple spindly legs maneuvering along the sandy sea bottom. And then, a shadow passed over it.
The armored creature hunkered down as it sensed the threat, but it didn’t do any good. Huge claws grabbed it from the sea bottom and held it before clamping down and filling the water with a mist of blood and flesh fragments.
The camera pulled back to show a huge, armored arthropod that looked like a mix between a spider, lobster, and scorpion.
“One of our first super predators to exist on our planet—the eurypterid Jaekelopterus, or giant sea scorpion.”
Jane paused to let the oohs and aahs die down.
“Nine feet in length and built for speed, it had large, eighteen-inch claws with embedded teeth for gripping their prey, plus the forward-facing stereoscopic vision of a hunter. The Devonian was a time when arthropods ruled the world.”
“Then we are lucky it didn’t la
st, hmm?” came a voice from the audience.
“Indeed we are.” She looked up but the faces were in darkness. She continued. “The Devonian was also a period of massive change in lifeforms.”
“Adaptive radiation.” That voice again. But it sounded too mature for a student.
“Yes, a term used to describe explosive and varied changes. Life exploded in the seas, then plants colonized the land, and then bony fish evolved throughout the world. Finally, it was followed by the animals, arthropod and tetrapod, leaving the oceans.”
She smiled ruefully. “The arthropods had a head start, but the fish grew more efficient lungs and became amphibians. Then they learned to lay dry eggs that didn’t need to hatch in the water. Then they grew big. And it was game, set, and match for the arthropods who were pushed back into second place.”
“But imagine if they won—the arthropods—what the world would look like. Can you imagine? I would think it would be a very frightening and dangerous world.”
She looked up and searched the area the voice had come from. There was a larger-than-normal figure there, but the face was obscured. She’d check again when the lights came up.
“Moving right along.” She hit the keyboard to advance the film. “The oceans gave us the first giants.”
The screen image showed a few bobbing ammonites, the coiled shells with large eyes and tentacles blooming out of the open end. Then came something looming up out of the blue haze of the sea depths.
“The first of the real giants appeared during the Triassic, the marine reptiles or fish lizards, and quickly dominated the seas.”
Something that looked like a giant pointy-headed dolphin appeared on the screen, except its tail moved side to side like a normal fish.
“The ichthyosaur grew to fifty feet in length and could move extremely fast for something so large.”
There were whistles of awe from the crowd, and Jane looked up. “I know, a big animal, but then in 2016 on a southwestern English beach, a large storm exposed the remains of Shonisaurus sikanniensis, a species of ichthyosaur that was eighty-five feet long—almost as big as a blue whale.”
She turned briefly to the screen as the huge fish glided out of the deep blue to swim past the camera. It seemed to take forever to go by them, and then an eye that must have been as large as a truck tire swiveled to give the camera a glassy stare before it continued into the endless blue water.
The camera zoomed back to lift high above the ocean and then the planet, and they watched as the single massive continent began to break up.
“Late in the Triassic, seafloor spreading led to rifting between the northern and southern portions of Pangaea, separating into two continents, Laurasia and Gondwana, which would be completed in the Jurassic Period. Our familiar world was beginning to take shape even then.”
The film then followed the coast lines that were shallow seas reaching miles inland and were the hunting grounds for the fearsome mosasaurs. Then, finally, there came a sound like the deep booming from rolling thunder and the screen whited out for a moment.
“But all things must end.” Jane tilted her head and watched as the final scenes of the movie showed a ring of smoke and fire moving across the globe. “Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid impacted with Earth off the Yucatan Peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico with the power of ten billion atomic bombs. It sent wildfires raging across thousands of miles as a vast sulfurous cloud blotted out the sun and drove the entire planet into a decade-long global winter. The fearsome giants of land and sea perished.”
She shrugged. “But without the mass extinction that ensued, humans would never have had the chance to evolve.”
“Ms. Baxter, do you think other giants will evolve—or have already and we just don’t know it yet?” The adult voice had a smile within it. “Perhaps they’re somewhere hidden from us.”
She winced, and then was annoyed with letting herself still be thrown off balance. But the insinuation seemed a little too knowing and it rattled her.
She composed herself and pasted on a smile. “Like I mentioned before, nature hates the vacuum of an empty niche and soon fills it. But there’s no vacuum right now, and evolution takes millions of years. Maybe there will be, but we might not be around to witness it.”
She stopped and looked up at the theatre. “Questions?”
There were many, but she managed to keep them all on topic.
From a back row: “Do you think those sea scorpion examples you gave us were the biggest those species ever got to?” a student asked.
Jane thought for a moment and shrugged. “Maybe.” She turned. “But unlikely.” She leaned on her desk. “Think of it this way—the average human being in the US is around five feet nine inches tall.” She smiled. “But George Bell, recognized by Guinness World Records as the tallest man in the United States, is seven feet eight inches. Thirty percent bigger than the average.”
She came around her desk. “The point I make here, is there are always outliers. Five-nine is the average. But there are lots of people over six feet even in this classroom. There’s also quite a few over six-six, and then a few like George Bell, over seven feet. They’re rare, but they’re out there.”
The time had flown, and she had enjoyed the class. And she thought the students had as well.
“And that brings us to today’s finale—the largest creature that ever lived in our oceans and ever will.” She called up the last image of the huge beast. “The blue whale, coming in at one hundred and twenty-five feet, and more than thirty feet longer than even the massive ichthyosaur. It is also the heaviest creature that ever lived. So, for those of you out there looking down in the mouth at the loss of the mighty marine reptiles, just remember, we still live in an age of giants.”
Jane took final questions, then closed the lecture and watched as the students began to file out as noisily as they filed in.
“One more question, Professor Baxter.”
It was the adult voice in her lecture.
“The enormous blue whale was the largest sea creature that ever lived…” He raised his eyebrows, “…on the surface of the planet. But maybe somewhere else, there are bigger things living, yes?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” She stared, but the guy stared right back.
“What about the legendary beasts? Giants like the Kraken, or Leviathan…” His smile remained. “Or perhaps, Dagon?”
Jane quickly turned the room’s lighting up.
The still-seated man was too old to be a student and far too well dressed. He had the tan of someone used to the outdoors, but he seemed too polished to be someone who worked there and had more the burnished skin of someone who lay on the deck of fast boats.
“As far as we know, and we do know,” Jane replied. “There is or was nothing larger. The fossil record doesn’t lie.”
“You just finished telling your students that sometimes ‘outliers’ remain hidden.” He smiled and it retained its warmth.
“Well, after centuries of fossil hunting, on land and sea, we’re confident we have a good idea in what has existed.” She shrugged. “The blue whale is still king.”
“On the surface,” he repeated. “Have you ever heard of a Russian by the name of Arkady Saknussov?” he asked. “He had a theory about hollow earth.”
Jane lifted her gaze to the man and stared for several seconds. Keep cool, she demanded of herself. She slowly shook her head. “I’m a scientist, and only dealing in reality today. But I may do a future lecture on mythological beasts. It’s an interesting topic, even if it is a little more crypto for my field.”
“I admire you, Ms. Baxter.” He kept his poker face.
Jane’s brows came together. “Have we met?”
The man got to his feet and began to walk toward her at the lectern. “My apologies for ambushing you, but I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”
He smiled with a perfect set of teeth. “Janus Anderson.” He stuck out a hand. “I consult to private and public
institutions. And specialize in salvaging and recovery.”
Jane took his hand. “Well, you know who I am.” She waited.
“Indeed, I do.” He motioned toward the screen. “You give a good presentation—informative, fact-based, and enjoyable. And you seem to enjoy it as much as your students.”
She sighed. “Mr. Anderson…”
“Janus.”
“Mr. Anderson, what can I do for you?” she asked, beginning to gather up her notes.
“I, my company, recover things, Ms. Baxter. Things lost recently, and things lost long ago.”
“Let me guess, shipwrecks and the like.” Her lips pressed into a line as she continued to pack up.
“Yes, and everything else. There’s nothing I can’t find, and nowhere I can’t get to. I also find lost people.” He pulled his phone from his pocket and searched it for a moment before hitting play on something and then holding it up to her.
“Help me.”
There came a few scraps of Russian language. And then.
“Help me. My name is Ally. Ally Bennet.”
Jane put her hand over her mouth, feeling like she was going to throw up. She glared. “You bastard.”
He nodded. “I’ve been called worse.” His smile was crooked. “I know you’re dying, and you know you’re dying. Aggressive carcinomas, brought about by exposure to various forms of radiation. So is Mike Monroe.”
Janus sat in the seat directly in front of her and leaned forward to clasp his hands together.
“Ally Bennet is still down there. And alive.” He nodded slowly. “The government wants her back.”
“You’re insane. Forget it.” She looked away.
He sighed. “If it was you trapped down there, would you want us to forget it, or come get you?”
Her head jerked up and she stared. She was confounded by his insights about her and Mike’s condition, and what he knew about, everything.
