“Challenger, how super! I thought you might have heard, but I did not expect a visit.”
“Hello, Margaret,” my old friend said. Walking forward, he grabbed the woman in a bear hug and lifted her bodily off the ground to be swung like a child in a wide circle. She giggled loudly as the Professor finally put her down.
“You two have met, then?” I said dryly.
Challenger’s smile was as broad as hers had been seconds earlier. “Malone, meet Mrs. Margaret Harcourt, the second-best paleontologist in the land.”
She shook my hand, her grip near as strong as that of Challenger.
“Malone’s a reporter,” Challenger said, and her smile went away as quickly as it had come. She started to shoo me out of the tent as if I was a recalcitrant puppy.
“I’ve made my feelings quite clear on you people,” she said, in a tone that made me feel somewhere between a common thief and a beggar. “There will be a full statement when the time is right.”
I had just about resigned myself to a wet trip back to Weymouth and ignominy when Challenger spoke up for me. “I’ll make sure he behaves,” the Professor said. “And, of course, there will be nothing published until you say so, Margaret.”
I wasn’t exactly sure how well that would go down with McGuire, but I held my tongue and waited for the lady’s reaction. It seemed that Challenger was in her good books, for she stopped shooing me, and, taking me by the hand led me back to the center of the site.
“I hope you’re right,” she said to Challenger. “For I am by no means ready to release any such statement. I’m rather glad to see you, Challenger, for in truth, I am completely baffled and need a second, or even a third opinion on what we have here.”
Challenger moved over to have a closer look at one of the fossil trunks. “Not gymnosperms?” he asked.
“Most decidedly not,” Mrs. Harcourt replied. “In fact, I’m not even sure they are plants at all.”
“Nonsense,” Challenger said. He bent closer. “They have to be.”
I saw the expression on his face change, from interest to something resembling shock.
“What is it, old man?” I asked.
It was the woman who replied. “He has just seen what I have seen. These things … whatever they are … have no precedent in the fossil record. I have no idea what we have here.”
I was left to my own devices for much of the next half hour as Challenger and the woman sat on their haunches examining the stumps, swapping Latin terminology and, to my ears anyway, esoteric ramblings on possible classification of the things. I watched them for a while, but boredom quickly set in, and I took myself to one side so I could have a smoke.
I had just got my pipe lit when the accident happened that changed everything.
It all seemed to occur in slow motion. One of the young assistants had overfilled a wheelbarrow with dirt and gravel. He struggled to push the top-heavy barrow on the stony ground, hit a rut while mid-push, and the whole thing toppled over on top of one of the taller of the stumps. The fossil buckled under the new weight and was torn completely out of the ground, falling heavily on its side.
The assistant was naturally apologetic, but Mrs. Harcourt was much more concerned with the state of the toppled fossil.
“We can only hope it is not completely ruined,” she said, bending to brush the gravel aside so that she could assess the damage.
“On the contrary,” Challenger replied, kneeling beside her. “This might be just what we needed. Look. There is some internal structure visible.”
I looked over his shoulder to see where he had indicated. The bottom of the fossil was crenellated and ridged. It just looked like more stone to me, but Challenger was clearly excited. Without further ado he lifted the fossil on his arms. It was nearly three feet long, and solid rock by the look of it, but Challenger’s strength was near-legendary, and he carried the stone with little apparent effort over to a row of trestle tables that were lined along one side of the tent.
I will admit that my own curiosity was piqued enough for me to join the scientists as they cleaned around the base of the stone. So it was I was close enough to hear Challenger gasp in astonishment.
“Look, Margaret,” he said, and pointed at the crenellations. “This isn’t a fossil at all. This thing is still alive. And it’s certainly no plant.”
We all leaned in closer. I saw immediately what Challenger had noticed; the crenellations were not rock at all; rather, they were soft folds of some dry tissue that seemed to be growing more moist as we looked.
“It’s picking up vapor from the air,” Mrs. Harcourt whispered. “How is this possible? It must be hundreds of millions years old.”
Challenger didn’t answer. He leaned over and prodded the “rock” with a pencil. The body swelled, then retracted.
“It’s breathing,” he said softly. He turned back to the woman. “We need to get these things, all of them, to a laboratory as soon as possible. They must be studied under strictly controlled conditions until we know what we have here.”
She agreed and started to marshal the youths under her command. Each of the fossils was brought up out of the ground in turn, and each showed the same soft crenellations at the base. By the time they were lined up together on the trestle table, they were all breathing independently, and the surface of their bodies no longer looked like rock, but had taken on the appearance of old leather, cracked and worn, but most definitely belonging to something that was alive.
Things got rather hectic for several hours, as carriage and transport were arranged, and once we got back to Weymouth, frantic telegrams were sent to both Kew and the Royal Zoological Society in attempts to find a laboratory willing to take the fossils. I had thought we might be forced to spend a night in the South West, but Challenger and Harcourt together were a redoubtable combination and proved more than a match for all the red tape and obfuscation that was thrown in front of us. By nine in the evening we were back on a train heading for London with the finds locked safely away in the luggage compartment at the rear.
Challenger and Harcourt wasted no time in getting back to their discussion of the provenance of the stumps we had dug out of the rock, but eventually both agreed that little was served by idle speculation, and we fell into quiet reflection. I used the time to scribble some notes, as I knew McGuire would expect a piece from me immediately on my return. As yet I had no hook on which to attach much of a story; I could not see the editor, or our readers, being particularly interested in rocks, no matter how much they appeared to be breathing.
As it happened, my story was handed to me an hour into our journey.
We had been climbing slowly up an incline for some minutes when the train came to a screeching halt as the driver threw on the brake, sending us tumbling inside the carriage in a tangle of arms and legs. Once we regained our composure, I rolled down the window and peered out into the dark. A guard walked past below carrying a lamp.
“Just stay where you are, guv’nor,” he said on seeing me. “Summat’s up in the luggage car, but I’m sure it’ll be fixed in a jiffy.”
Remembering what we had left in that compartment, I wasn’t quite so sure of his prognosis. And when I relayed what the man had said to Challenger, the Professor agreed with me immediately.
“It cannot be a coincidence. Come on, old boy. Let’s see what’s up.”
Without further ado he opened the door and jumped down onto the tracks. I followed suit and turned to tell Mrs. Harcourt we would not be long. She, however, had ideas of her own.
“Look out,” she said. “I’m coming down.”
She jumped and I managed to take her weight to stop her crashing to the rail below. The three of us followed the bobbing light carried by the guard as he headed for the rear of the train.
It became quickly apparent that the matter was more serious than the guard had thought. Even though we were twenty yards behind him with the wind at our backs, we heard his strangled shout, a mixture of astonishment and f
ear. Challenger broke into a run, and it was all I could do to keep up with him.
We arrived at the rear of the train to find the guard looking down at his feet. At first I thought it was just a discarded overcoat. Then I saw the loose folds of skin, and the badly distorted yet still recognizable features of a human face. It had collapsed in on itself, as had the rest of him that could be seen … it seemed that every bone in the man’s body had been dissolved away, leaving no visible wounds, no trace of how it might have been done.
“It’s Jimmy Deacon,” the guard said. He was as pale as any man I have ever seen. “I don’t understand. He was right as rain when we set out.”
As if to punctuate the phrase, something banged, hard, against the side of the luggage car from within. The carriage door was lying halfway open, but I could only see darkness beyond. And I was none too sure that I wanted to see any clearer.
Challenger, not known for his reticence, started to move toward the stationary car until I put a hand on his arm.
“Steady on,” I said. “We have no idea what’s going on here.”
Challenger looked angry. “That’s what I intend to find out.” He took the brass lantern from the Guard’s shaking hand. “Are you with me, Malone?”
It wasn’t the first time I’d stood by his side in a perilous place, but as we walked toward the luggage carriage I was fervently praying it would not be my last. I turned, expecting the Harcourt woman to be following, but she was deep in conversation with the guard and showed no sign of joining us.
The heavy thudding on the walls of the carriage got louder as we approached.
Challenger clambered up onto the foot rail first, giving me a hand to haul myself up behind him. We stood there for several seconds looking into the darkness beyond the door. I heard another series of thumps, like a dog’s tail on a wooden floor, wagging in anticipation of a master’s arrival home. I did not think we were going to face anything quite so prosaic.
“After you, old man,” I whispered. I was starting to wish I had brought something, anything that might be useful as a weapon, but as we stepped in through the door I saw that anything short of a cannon would have proved useless.
All eight of the things we had brought up out of the ground stood upright in a clump in the center of the carriage. At their feet lay the sad, deflated corpses of what had been two dogs that had the misfortune to have been traveling in the compartment.
It was obvious now, if it hadn’t been already, that these “stones” were very much alive. As I said previously, they looked like stunted barrels. At their base five appendages—I hesitate to call them feet—supported the weight. They had all opened out at the head region, showing a five-pointed structure that looked like nothing else but soft green soap. But it was the wings that got my attention. They were thin, almost like gossamer. But they were four feet long and more, extending from the sides of each of the trunks, and they lashed, in unison, against the wall of the carriage, hard enough to tear splinters from the walls and leave deep gouges in their wake.
Challenger, fearless as ever, stepped forward, lantern raised to get a closer look.
The wings stopped thrashing. The creatures—as I now thought of them—went still, then the strangest thing happened. The appendages at the head end of each of them swung in our direction, and although there were no eyes, I knew, with certainty, that we were being scrutinized. At the same time they set up a high whine that vibrated through their bodies, setting the wings a-flutter and ringing out loudly around us.
Tekeli-Li!
The sound set my teeth on edge, and my legs went weak under me. Suddenly I was thinking again of the deflated corpse out on the tracks. Challenger must have been having the same thought. He threw the lantern to the ground at the base of the creatures where it smashed and splashed a flare of burning oil over the trunks. The high whine got louder, more frantic, but at least the power of movement had returned to my limbs. Clutching each other in a mad parody of a dance, Challenger and I retreated from the carriage, as the flames grew higher and hotter.
The whining call got louder still, ringing in my ears.
Tekeli-Li!
As we reached the foot rail on the outside of the carriage my knees went weak again and gave way beneath me. I stumbled, almost fell, and only Challenger’s brute strength and his iron grip on my arm stopped me from tumbling headlong to the rails below.
“Jump down, gentlemen,” a voice that would brook no argument said. Challenger took me in his arms as if I weighed no more than a child and leapt off the carriage. At the same time something hot blazed past my ear. There was a crash of breaking glass from inside the carriage, then more flame spurted from the open door. I turned my head in time to see Mrs. Harcourt throw another lantern into the conflagration.
“Now,” she shouted. I heard iron grind against iron and saw the guard disengage the burning carriage. It rolled away, slowly at first then gathering speed as the incline did its job. In mere seconds it was a ball of fire hurtling downhill away from us.
Challenger put me down. I stood, testing my weight on my legs. I felt as weak as a newborn lamb, but it seemed I still had my bones in place.
Tekeli-Li!
The call came to us, clear in the night air, just seconds before the burning carriage leapt off the tracks, careered down the hillside and burst apart in an explosion of sparks and smoke.
There was an investigation, of course. Firstly, by Challenger, at dawn, when we sifted through the wreckage to ensure that nothing had survived, then by the powers that be, who mainly seemed to want to know who was going to pay for the burnt-out carriage.
McGuire got a story, of sorts, and the Geological Society quietly shipped Mrs. Harcourt off to Patagonia. Challenger petitioned to be allowed to do more excavation at the original site, but that idea was scuppered completely a week later when the whole side of the cliff fell into the sea. Both the Professor and I suspected the hand of the bureaucrats in the matter, but all our efforts at finding an explanation met with only silence and red tape.
The Petrified Forest has long since passed out of public ken. But I hear it still, in the dark stretches of night, and on those occasions I have to get out of bed and stretch my legs, just to ensure that I still have a skeleton inside me.
Tekeli-Li!
The Monster of the Ness
It came as no surprise to me to find Challenger in the bar of the Fort Augustus Hotel that sultry night in June. How could I have expected him, of all people, to ignore a report of a dinosaur in one of Scotland’s biggest lochs? What did surprise me was that he had got this far north before me, given that I had left the Express newsroom almost as soon as the report had come over the wire, and caught the first available train out of Euston heading north. I had paused only long enough to pick up a traveling case from my lodgings. On my way here I had quietly congratulated myself on my swift passage and had been confident that I would be first on the scene.
If I had wanted to keep a low profile on arrival, my hopes would have been dashed straight away, as Challenger saw me enter and bellowed across the bar, “Malone! Well met, old chap. Come and join me; this Scotch is marvelous.”
I gave in to the inevitable and joined him at the bar. To be fair, the Scotch was jolly good stuff. I ordered us both another, just to make sure, and lit up a pipe. It was starting to feel like one of those nights; I have had several in Challenger’s company, mostly resulting in a woozy stomach and a headache in the morning. But the entertainment value of the night itself usually more than made up for any discomfort the next day. That night in Fort Augustus was to prove no exception.
I began by asking how it was that he had managed to arrive before me. His booming laugh filled the bar again.
“I’ve been here for three days already, Malone,” he said. “Who do you think it was that sent the report to your newsroom?”
It proved to be downhill from there. In the course of an alcohol-fueled evening I discovered several things; Challenger was chasing a l
egend of a beast in the loch … and there had been no sighting. He had fabricated the story as a ruse to try to drum up enough interest to warrant an investigation. So here I was, investigating. Or rather, here I was, enjoying the finest hospitality Scotland could offer. And I’m afraid I enjoyed it rather too much.
I woke in the morning with a hangover befitting the amount of Scotch I had consumed the night before. Even a hearty breakfast failed to put me back on an even keel, and I was seriously considering returning to bed. So I was not best pleased when Challenger, full of good humor and looking none the worse for wear, bellowed across the dining room.
“Come on, Malone. Don’t hang around. The boat’s ready.”
The boat turned out to be a small two-man affair, with no motor, just a pair of oars. I had one look at it, then turned away.
“I’m not up to any exertion this morning, old chap,” I said.
But Challenger didn’t give up that easily. “In that case, I shall row,” he said, and all but manhandled me into the boat. He dropped a bag into the bottom beside me. It clinked, glass against glass.
“If that’s more Scotch, I’m not up to that either,” I said, but Challenger merely smiled. He cast off, climbed down into the boat and within seconds was taking us away from the jetty out onto the loch. Luckily for my somewhat delicate disposition, the water proved to be almost flat calm, and after several minutes I even felt bold enough to light up a smoke. Challenger downed oars and joined me. We sat still in quiet water a hundred yards off the shore of the old castle on the loch side.
“Tell me again,” I said. “My memory of last night is hazy at best. What exactly are we doing out here?”
Challenger puffed at one of his foul Russian cheroots. I was glad we were outdoors, for in a confined space those things were known to asphyxiate anyone who wasn’t careful.
Professor Challenger: The Kew Growths and Other Stories Page 5
