Shadow Creatures

by Andrew Lane

  The rocket whished out of the cardboard tube and away from him with a horizontal spray of golden sparks. He felt his hand burning as the sparks peppered it.

  The rocket flashed a few inches away from Roxton’s face. He screamed and clutched at his eyes, just like his friend had done, but for a different reason.

  The centipede seemed to sense something. It scuttled upward, and the rocket hit the column just below where it hung, exploding in an expanding cloud of red, green, blue and yellow stars. Rhino’s eyes were dazzled, but he could just see the centipede turn and head upward, towards the hole between the top of the column and the ceiling.

  Rhino lit another rocket, and aimed high.

  Another whish! as the rocket launched from the tube towards the giant centipede. More golden sparks. Rhino’s hand was an agony of burning, blistered flesh. For a second he thought he had misjudged it, and the creature would be inside the hole before the rocket could get to it, but the rocket went in and exploded outward, blasting the centipede apart in glowing colours. Even at that distance, Rhino could smell something cooking. Bits of centipede fell to the ground, still burning.

  Rhino looked around, cradling his injured hand. One or two people from the market were looking over in their direction, but mostly they were being ignored.

  He walked across to where Roxton was writhing on the ground, holding his burnt eyes. He would collect the bits of giant centipede later, see if he could retrieve a chunk of unburned flesh, and then put the rest of it in the sack and burn it all, but first he had something to do.

  ‘You never go anywhere unprepared,’ he said to Roxton. ‘Where’s the first-aid kit?’

  ‘My eyes!’ Roxton moaned. ‘I need help!’

  ‘First-aid kit?’ Rhino prompted.

  ‘The man who got spat at by that damned creature,’ Roxton said, seemingly forcing the words out, ‘he has the first-aid kit. It’s a pack on his belt.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Rhino said. He crossed to the other man, who was lying on the ground and twitching. He did, indeed, have a first-aid kit attached to his belt. Rhino unclipped it and walked away, opening it up as he went. There had to be a burn ointment in there somewhere.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Roxton screamed, hearing the footsteps moving away. ‘I’m injured!’

  ‘Yes,’ Rhino said quietly, ‘but I’ve hurt my hand, and that’s much more important. I’ll see you around, Craig.’ He smiled as he walked. ‘Although I’m not entirely sure you’ll be seeing me.’

  Despite the long time he’d spent in bed at the Robledo Mountains Technology establishment in Las Cruces, Calum slept for a good few hours aboard Gillian Livingstone’s jet. The stress of the past few days had pushed him right to the edge, and he needed to recharge his physical and mental batteries. The last thought he had before he slid into welcome unconsciousness was to wonder whether the aircraft actually belonged to Gillian, or whether she’d hired it or borrowed it from some corporation that owed her a favour. However she’d got it, it was nice: small, with a main cabin that had eight comfortable chairs in it, and a full bathroom in the back.

  Getting out of Nemor Incorporated’s clutches was A Good Thing, but An Even Better Thing happened as they were leaving. Dr Kircher came up to Gillian’s limousine, outside the Robledo Mountains Technology building, with a plastic crate just like the one that Gillian had brought to Calum’s apartment days ago.

  ‘Oh, more bionic legs,’ Calum said without any noticeable enthusiasm. ‘Just what I want.’

  ‘These ones aren’t controlled by your brain impulses,’ Kircher said, obviously embarrassed and guilty, ‘but they are the next best thing. There’s a small hand-held controller that straps round your wrist and sits in the palm of your hand. You can use it to operate the legs – forward and back, up stairs and down, fast or slow.’ He shrugged. ‘There’s obviously a design flaw in the brain-impulse software we tried to use. It’s too vulnerable to interference from other equipment in the vicinity.’ He frowned. ‘Although we never tied down exactly what happened with the ARLENE robot to make it react like that. Anyway – take these as a form of apology. Things went too far – much further than I should have let them.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Calum, genuinely touched. He knew that Kircher had just been a tool, and that Dave Pournell had been the man wielding the tool, but Pournell had already left after taking a long phone call from, presumably, his bosses during which he had said very little and listened a lot, mostly with a dark expression on his face. Based on the expression on Gillian’s face, the phone call had had something to do with her. Calum was surprised, and disturbed, at how far her influence extended.

  But at least he managed to walk on to Gillian’s aircraft, rather than being carried, using the new legs. That was a small victory of his own.

  When he woke up from his deep, dreamless sleep, Gillian was sitting opposite him, staring at him. She looked . . . tired. Unhappy.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

  ‘Physically – a bit shaky,’ he said. ‘Mentally – what do you think?’

  She nodded softly. ‘You’re wondering how deeply I’m involved with Nemor, or how deeply they’re involved with me.’

  He said nothing, just staring at her until she looked away.

  ‘I’ve done some work for them before,’ she said. ‘I’ve done work for a lot of companies. Nemor have fingers in a great many pies, and they’ve got a lot of influence in high places. It doesn’t do to cross them.’

  ‘But you did,’ he pointed out.

  ‘I had to. I honestly didn’t know that they would go so far as to kidnap you and threaten you. I’d been asked by them to talk to you, see if you could be persuaded to release the Almasti DNA, but I didn’t know they were going to take their own action.’ She sighed. ‘I’m sorry, Calum. I should have told you. I should have been honest.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, but he was remembering how Gillian’s daughter, Natalie, had been put into physical danger in Georgia, and how neither he nor Natalie had told Gillian the full story. Maybe there was fault on both sides.

  ‘How did you find out I’d been kidnapped?’ he asked. ‘I sent you emails, but I didn’t get any answer from you. Did you get my emails?’

  Gillian looked away, out of one of the aircraft windows. ‘I did,’ she said slowly, ‘and I was trying to get hold of someone high up in Nemor Inc., to find out what was going on. I only decided to take more direct action when Rhino phoned me from Hong Kong and told me exactly what had happened and where you were. He was . . . very persuasive.’ She closed her eyes for a long moment. ‘He had seen me having a coffee with . . . someone from Nemor Incorporated, and he threatened to tell you, and Natalie. I decided that my relationship with the two of you is much more important than my business relationships.’

  ‘Gillian, what’s the story with Nemor Incorporated?’ Calum asked. ‘What do they really want?’

  ‘That,’ she said, ‘is a simple question with a very complicated answer, and I don’t think I can give you that answer right now. They’ve been around for a hundred years or more. They used to be known as the Paradol Corporation, and before that they were something else with “Paradol” in the title. They have a lot of influence, but nobody really knows what they want.’

  ‘How long have you been working for them?’

  ‘With them,’ she pointed out. ‘There is a difference.’

  ‘OK – with them.’

  She still wouldn’t meet his gaze. ‘Since before your parents died,’ she said softly. ‘Let’s leave it at that.’

  Calum closed his eyes. Gillian wasn’t going to tell him anything else – not now, anyway. He would work on her, subtly, over time, and he would get more details. And, after that, he and Nemor Incorporated would be meeting again – but on his terms.

  epilogue

  Calum, Tara, Gecko, Natalie and Rhino were all in Calum’s apartment. Most of them were sitting on his sofa or easy chairs, but Natalie was over at his nine-screen computer system. She
had headphones on. Instead of listening to music she was talking in a low voice into the attached microphone.

  ‘Were the DNA samples viable?’ Rhino asked, pulling Calum’s attention away from Natalie. Rhino’s hand was bandaged, and he kept rubbing it on the arm of his chair. ‘Could you actually get anything usable?’

  ‘Well,’ Calum said carefully, ‘yours was pretty crispy, and the one Gecko and Natalie brought back was hammered fairly flat, but between the two of them I think we can put together a good sample. I still haven’t decided where to send them though. Same with the Almasti DNA. I’ve got to make the right choice, and I’ve got to be very careful that Nemor Incorporated don’t somehow own or control whatever laboratory I decide on.’ He hunched his shoulders, feeling a chill. ‘I’d assumed they would leave us alone after the Almasti adventure, but that’s not the case. They’re watching us carefully, and we need to take precautions.’

  He glanced sideways to where Natalie was sitting at his computer system. He hadn’t mentioned the involvement of her mother yet. He wasn’t sure he ever would.

  ‘What is she doing?’ Tara asked, following his gaze.

  Gecko frowned. ‘I believe she is talking with this United Nations biologist that she first spoke to in Hong Kong – the one who joined in the raid on Xi Lang’s warehouse. His name is Evan Chan. Apparently he is very impressed with her dedication to endangered wildlife, and she is very impressed with his clean-cut good looks and his ponytail.’

  Calum felt a little knot of jealousy coil in his stomach, and tried to quash it. Natalie could talk to whomever she wanted. Obviously she could.

  ‘Typical,’ Tara sniffed, which pretty much summed up Calum’s real thoughts.

  ‘You can talk,’ Rhino pointed out reasonably. ‘How many texts have you and this Tom Karavla exchanged today?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tara said primly, but she was blushing. ‘I haven’t been counting.’

  Gecko was shifting in his seat, and the expression on his face made him look as if he was feeling the same way that Calum was. Before he could say anything Rhino asked, ‘So what happens to the giant centipedes now? Not that I wish them well or anything, but I know you have strong feelings about not letting things like these be exposed to the world or abused by anyone like Nemor Incorporated.’

  ‘We know the location in Hainan Island,’ Calum pointed out, ‘because it was on Xi Lang’s removable hard drive. Assuming that he’s now either in custody or on the run, we’re the only people who know the spot, and I want to keep it that way. Hainan Island is covered in tropical rainforest. It’s unlikely that anyone will just stumble across the centipedes, so they should be OK, living their lives, eating monkeys or whatever it is that they do.’

  There was silence for a few moments. Tara broke it by saying, ‘So what next? Are we working our way through a list, or what?’

  Calum thought. It was a good question. The website hadn’t come up with anything recently, but there were always the standard legends to investigate – the Loch Ness Monster, the Sasquatch, the Chupacabra. It was unlikely there was any basis in fact there, but it wouldn’t hurt to take a look.

  Although . . .

  ‘Have any of you ever heard of the mokèlémbembe . . . ?’ he asked.

  AUTHOR’S notes

  Planning this, the second book in the Lost Worlds series, I knew I wanted it to be quite different to the first book while still following the same general plan – which sounds like a contradiction in terms, and probably is.

  There had to be a ‘cryptid’, of course – a creature that biologists have either not discovered and catalogued yet or think became extinct a long time ago. I’d used a tribe of Neanderthal-like primitive humans in the first book, so I knew I wanted something as inhuman as possible here. Giant centipedes did the trick for me. I was going to use giant millipedes (I had a large millipede crawl over my hand, once, and it’s a curiously pleasant tickling sensation), but I found out pretty quickly that millipedes are vegetarian while centipedes are carnivorous. Writing a book about kids trying to find a vegetarian that tickles you when it walks across you struck me as being essentially self-defeating. Where’s the drama? So I went for centipedes. They wriggle from side to side when they run, which makes them creepier than millipedes, who travel in a straight line. And they can be poisonous.

  Millipedes don’t have a thousand legs, by the way, despite their name. They have between 36 and 750 legs. Centipedes, you will not be surprised to learn, don’t have a hundred legs – they have between 20 and 300, more or less. Yes, that’s right, there are some centipedes that have more legs than some millipedes. Taxonomy (the naming of living creatures) is a funny thing.

  And before anyone decides to write to me pointing out an obvious mistake – yes, I know that arthropods can’t grow as large as the ones in this book. This is because they don’t have lungs and depend instead on oxygen transfusing through their bodies from holes along their sides, and there is a limit to how fast the oxygen can transfuse that limits their size. They can’t evolve lungs because they have hard exoskeletons, and there’s no way they could inflate and deflate them to get air in and out. I’m imagining, for the sake of art, that a giant centipede might have evolved a mechanism where the side-to-side wriggling as it runs could act as a crude set of bellows, pumping air in and then pumping it out again. Hey, it’s my book; I can do what I like.

  Why Hong Kong as a background? Well, again, in the first book I had the primitive humans living in a very crude, no-tech cave village in the wilds of Eastern Europe. For contrast, I wanted this book to feature a much more high-tech, crowded environment. I’ve spent a couple of weeks in Hong Kong in the past, and the place fascinates me. The Star Ferries journey from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island is possibly my favourite journey in the entire world. I’ve taken certain liberties with geography and names – Tungking Mansions is actually a dirtied-down version of a real building – Chungking Mansions – and I’ve relocated the Jade Market from a dingy covered square to actually being inside the Mansions.

  Why Las Cruces as another background? I’ve spent quite a lot of time in America, over the past thirty years, and New Mexico also fascinates me – partly because of the geography and partly because of the Mexican influences on the architecture and the food. Especially the food. I do like food. I once flew in to El Paso Airport and drove to Las Cruces, on my way to the White Sands Missile Range, past desert and mountain ranges and miles and miles of cattle in pens, and had a really good time there. I wanted to recapture the environment in prose. Not that Calum gets to see much of Las Cruces, but at least I know what’s outside his window.

  Out of interest, I was intending to set the last few chapters on Hainan Island, where Rhino, Natalie and Gecko would have had to confront a whole nest of giant centipedes, but that seemed like overkill. I could do everything I needed to in Hong Kong – and, ultimately, the book is about the people in it, not the creatures. That’s my theory, anyway.

  So – here we are. Calum, Natalie, Gecko and Tara have changed and developed a little (Rhino not so much) and the plot has thickened in interestingly unpredictable ways. And we have two new potential characters to think about – Evan Chan and Tom Karavla. How will they change the relationships within the group of friends? Will they be there in the next book? Will there even be a next book? Only time will tell.

  I’m off now to work on the next Young Sherlock Holmes book, and some other projects that I have been thinking about. Hopefully I’ll be able to talk to you again in a few months’ time. I’m looking forward to it already.

  Andrew Lane

  acknowledgements

  I would like to express my thanks, as ever, to a trio of remarkable people: my agent, Robert Kirby; my editor, Polly Nolan; and my publicist, Sally Oliphant (now departed for foreign places that, hopefully, don’t have cryptids anywhere in the vicinity). I would also like to thank Octavia Karavla, of the wonderful Octavia’s Books in Cirencester, for allowing me to use her name. There are lots of l
ovely Croatians, and she is one of them. Two of the three Croatians in this book are not so nice. Thanks also to Linda Wilson and Liz Watson, for reading and criticizing an early draft of the book, and thanks to the gentlemen I will call ‘Mark’ and ‘Duncan’ for, between them, providing the inspiration for the character of Rhino Gillis.

  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.

  IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE, CALUM’S LIFE CHANGED. IN THE CLICK OF A MOUSE, IT WILL CHANGE AGAIN . . .

  Partially paralysed in the crash that killed his parents, teenager Calum Challenger lives alone, searching the net for proof that ‘extinct’ creatures exist. He believes that, if they do, their DNA could cure him.

  When something that looks like a yeti is spotted in the Georgian mountains, Calum springs into action – but so does a corporation called Nemor. Calum wants to harvest the creature’s DNA and then protect it. Nemor wants to harvest its DNA and then kill it.

  From his high-tech apartment, Calum uses cutting-edge technology to direct a group of misfit friends on a deadly chase in the harshest of environments. As danger mounts, fear starts to spread: can the team really trust the boy on whom they are dependent for survival? And how can they save a creature already on the brink of extinction?