Cryptozoica

by Mark Ellis

  Squinting, Honoré read the first few lines: We are now in sight of the Tamtungs. The two islands are thickly forested with tropical jungle, but the larger also exhibits a more mountainous terrain, due no doubt to the extinct volcanic peak. Captain Fitzroy has never visited them and indeed claims that only Malay sailors have ever set foot upon them. They bestowed that name upon the islands because it means soiled or unclean. The Tamtungs are reputed to be the most inhospitable of environments.

  However, from a distance, they appear far more inviting than the rugged, lizard-infested shores of the Galapagos. The vegetation is of the type usual to tropical isles. There is noni enata, ironwood, candlenut trees, hibiscus and pandanus. Dr. Belleau is most anxious to go ashore and collect botanical specimens.

  Honoré looked up again, marking her place with a finger. “Doctor Belleau?”

  “Dr. Jacque Belleau,” the little man replied. “My great-great-grandfather.”

  “I don’t associate his name with The Voyage of the Beagle.”

  “There’s no reason why you should. Like me, great-great-granddad was quite the accomplished arranger. He arranged to keep himself out of the history books.”

  “Unlike his more flamboyant descendant,” Honoré observed dryly. “So he had sufficient influence to delete his presence from the journals and logs of the Beagle?”

  Belleau nodded, smiling crookedly. “You may read on if you like, but the ink has completely faded away on some of the pages. I can fill in the blanks, if you prefer.”

  “I do.”

  Matter-of-factly, Belleau stated, “Charles Darwin, in the company of ship’s draftsman Conrad Martens, Bosun Samuel Hoxie, Jacque Belleau and two sailors made landfall upon the island of Big Tamtung on the afternoon of May 6th, 1836. Within hours, the party realized that the island might be the most extraordinary place on Earth, harboring as it did dinosaurian survivors from the Cretaceous period.”

  Honoré rolled her eyes. “Oh, please.”

  “Please what?” Belleau asked, face expressing complete innocence.

  “I told you before the entire concept is ridiculous. Tales of such an island would have circulated for centuries, become part of folklore.”

  “Who is to say they didn’t? Have you ever heard of the Isle of Demons?”

  “No.”

  “Check it out on the Internet. The Isle of Demons is a legendary land that began appearing on maps in the beginning of the 1500s, and then disappeared in the mid-1700s. It was generally shown as two islands. It was believed that the islands were populated by demons and wild beasts. They would torment and attack anyone who was foolish enough to wander on to the island.”

  Honoré angled an eyebrow. “And the demons were dinosaurs?”

  “Look in the back. The volume comes complete with illustrations.”

  Eyebrow still angled, Honoré did as he instructed, flipping the pages aside until she reached a black and white rendering of a bipedal, erect-standing dinosaur, with a large cruelly hooked talon on its second toe. “A Deinonychus…judging by the length of the neck, of the dromaeosaurid subgroup.”

  “Colloquially known as a velociraptor,” commented Belleau. “If you look at the bottom right hand corner of the paper, you’ll find the signature of Conrad Martens and the date, May 1836. Obviously, he sketched it from life since at that time no fossils of the Deinoncychus had yet been discovered. For that matter, Richard Owen had yet to coin the term ‘dinosaur’.”

  Honoré stared at the drawing numbly. She was barely aware of murmuring; “The Deinonychus wasn’t discovered until 1964, in Montana.”

  Belleau took another sip of his drink. “Precisely. So the only explanation for Martens’ accurate rendering in 1836 is that he actually saw a living, breathing specimen. In fact, it attacked and nearly killed Samuel Hoxie. Jacque Belleau was instrumental in saving his life.”

  Mesmerized, Honoré turned to the next picture, a profile view of the Deinoncychus, with even the pattern of scales that coated the snout sharply detailed. A crest of feathers slanted back from the top of the skull. She studied it, turning the book this way and that. Softly, she said, “The cranial configuration is slightly different than the fossils that have been discovered. The occipital casing seems a bit larger. And are those feathers?”

  “It’s been sixty-five million years since they last roamed,” Belleau remarked. “Naturally, there have been a few adaptive changes. Apparently, Ostrum’s work on the Deinonychus and his theory that the smaller theropods developed feathers as insulation has been validated.”

  Honoré found herself starting to agree, then as if a cold bucket of water had been dashed into her face, she straightened up in her chair, glaring angrily at Belleau. “This is insane on so many levels I don’t know where to begin!”

  Belleau swirled his drink, ice-cubes clinking. “Should we begin with Charles Darwin and why he kept the Beagle’s visit to the Tamtungs secret?”

  “Actually, we should start with why anybody would believe this rubbish.”

  Mildly, Belleau said, “I believe it. I have no reason not to. Many other people believe it too.”

  “Name two,” Honoré shot back.

  “I could name far more than that, but a head count of believers isn’t relevant at this juncture. Are you familiar with The Lost World? The novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle?”

  Despite herself, Honoré couldn’t help but smile. “Of course. That book was probably the seminal influence on generations of children who became paleontologists.”

  “Would it surprise you to learn that Sir Arthur based the novel’s Maple White Land, his ‘lost world,’ on scraps of information that came his way about Big Tamtung?”

  “It would indeed surprise me,” Honoré conceded. “I don’t know if I’d accept it as truth.”

  “You might recall that Sir Arthur explained the survival of the prehistoric creatures and conservation of the flora due to the extreme isolation of the Amazonian plateau.”

  “It sounded semi-reasonable for a book written in 1910, but it’s utterly unbelievable by the scientific standards of the 21st century.”

  “Not when judged by quantum evolutionary theory. Are you familiar with it?”

  Honoré nodded uncertainly. “Somewhat. According to the foundation of the theory, some lineages in the fossil record evolved with extraordinary slowness, others more rapidly. Most phyletic lines of evolution occurred in a moderate and steady manner, while others showed fluctuating patterns of evolutionary descent.”

  “Just so. The most rapid of those patterns was dubbed ‘quantum evolution.’ Proponents believe that major evolutionary transitions arise when small populations—isolated and limited from normal genetic flow—would fixate upon unusual gene combinations. The unadaptive phase would then, by natural selection, drive a population from one stable adaptive peak to another to a final stage.”

  “And you say that’s what happened on Big Tamtung?”

  “Partly.” Belleau shrugged. “I realize this all seems a bit much to absorb in one sitting, but it’s the truth. On Big Tamtung, the past has not stopped breathing. The evidence is there, darlin’.”

  Scowling, Honoré slapped the open book in her lap. “This is by no means evidence. At best, it’s a fanciful footnote to actual history. At worst, it’s a Cardiff Giant type hoax that never got off the ground.”

  Belleau shook his head. “Skepticism is a trait to be encouraged, but what you’re exhibiting is closer to denial. You haven’t looked at the entire photographic record.”

  Swiftly, angrily, Honoré flipped page after page, reviewing the photographs within the transparent sleeves. They progressed from blurry black-and-white plates of smudges that might have been animals or even shrubs, to color shots of distant quadrupedal and bipedal shapes.

  Only one photo depicted a creature with any degree of clarity. A dark green mass with outspread feathery wings filled the frame. She prepared to dismiss it as an out-of-focus shot of a tropical bird, until she identified the three h
ighly developed, claw-tipped fingers at the top wing-joint.

  The word archaeopteryx jumped to the forefront of her mind, but she refused to utter it. Instead she asked, “When and how were these pictures taken?”

  “A concealed duck blind was constructed in the 1840s and maintained until about thirty-five years ago,” Belleau answered.

  “Maintained by whom?” she demanded.

  “All in good time, darlin’. All in good time.”

  Honoré thumbed through several other photographs, but they depicted human beings. She gazed at a candid shot of a tall, lean man wearing the dark blue dress uniform of the United States Air Force. Sunglasses masked his eyes and Captain’s bars glinted on his collar.

  “Who is this?” she asked.

  Belleau craned his neck and snorted derisively. “A nobody. His name is Kavanaugh, a former officer in the US Air Force. As I understand it, he’s known as Tombstone Jack.”

  The man’s face was not conventionally handsome. In fact, it had a craggy, rawboned, American Indian stolidity, but she found something strangely appealing in it.

  “He left the military and opened a rather disreputable travel agency in partnership with another nobody,” Belleau continued contemptuously. “He’s more or less responsible for the entire Cryptozoica debacle. I’ll tell you about that later.”

  “Why not now?”

  “Does he interest you for some reason?”

  Honoré detected a hint of jealously underscoring Belleau’s voice. Rather than respond to it, she turned the page to another photograph. Three men stood outside of a white-walled building in bright sunlight, all of them with cigars jutting at jaunty angles from grinning mouths. The blond man in the center had his arms draped around the shoulders of Kavanaugh and a big black man. The building in the background bore a sign reading Cryptozoica Enterprises & Horizons Unlimited.

  “Who is this?” Honoré asked, turning the book toward Belleau.

  “The man in the middle is Howard Philips Flitcroft himself…the other is Kavanaugh and his partner, Augustus Crowe. The other nobody I mentioned.” He paused and added sourly, “All Yanks, of course.”

  Honoré smiled. “Of course. So am I to understand that these are the principals in the Cryptozoica affair?”

  Belleau shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Not quite all of them. Frankly, I’m reluctant to share everything about the Tamtungs and Cryptozoica with you.”

  Honoré slitted her eyes. “Then I shall be equally reluctant to give you my full cooperation.”

  Belleau leaned forward, placing a hand lightly on her right knee, gazing earnestly into her face. “Honoré, I will be breaking an oath sworn to a brotherhood that male members of my family have been part of for nearly two hundred years.”

  Honoré crossed her legs, dislodging the man’s hand. “The Freemasons?”

  Belleau bared his teeth in a ferocious scowl, then it turned into a rueful grin. “My darlin’ Dr. Roxton. You need to be indoctrinated so you can grasp the entire convoluted context.”

  Lifting the glass to his lips, Aubrey Belleau drained the last of the Singapore Sling, took a deep breath and stated, “We shall begin your indoctrination with a lesson in hidden history. What do you know of the School of Night?”

  “Nothing.”

  Belleau’s grin widened and he reached into the valise. “Tell me, Honoré …in your studies did you ever come across references to Prima Materia?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  May 11th

  The morning sky was as blue as a dream of summer, full of wispy white clouds and lazy shadows. Mouzi thought about all of her unfulfilled summer dreams and blinked back the stinging tears of self-pity.

  Then the greasy socket wrench slipped on the nut and she skinned a knuckle against a flange of the bilge pump. Turning her face toward the sky, she shouted loudly and earnestly, “Fuck this!”

  Crowe poked his head up through the hatchway and asked mildly, “Does that help or do you need another set of wrenches?”

  Massaging her throbbing right hand, Mouzi said sullenly, “Another set of knuckles, more like.”

  Crowe heaved himself up onto the vaka, the main deck of the Krakatoa. His pants legs were wet from the cuff to the knee with foul-smelling bilge water. The noonday sun blazed down with a heat only a few degrees shy of merciless. The strip of cloth tied around his forehead was soaked through with sweat. Perspiration trickled down his face and clung to the ends of his mustache like tiny glass beads.

  Mouzi wore a one-piece black thong leotard. It barely contained one sixty-fourth of her caramel-colored body. She shifted position, allowing Crowe an unrestricted view of the bulldog’s face snarling from her right buttock. The small tattoo of the dog wearing a German coalscuttle helmet symbolized her membership in the Mongrel Mob, the Maori street-gang she had joined while running wild in New Zealand’s Rotorura district.

  The Krakatoa rocked slightly on the swells. The day had dawned mild, the seas fairly calm, the sun strong and so Crowe decided it was as good a time as any to work on the trimaran’s bilge pump. If nothing else, it kept him and Mouzi from being drafted into house-painting detail by Flitcroft.

  Shading her eyes with her hands, Mouzi gazed in the direction of the canal cutting past of the Huang Luan. Seagulls swooped and dove at a dark shape bobbing on the water, trapped between a piling and the canal wall. She turned away disinterestedly, looking toward the hotel.

  Several men hosed down the façade and sloshed soapy water over the windows. Old Tinh Bien, the island’s self-proclaimed calligrapher, stood on a ladder and meticulously repainted the words Cryptozoica Enterprises & Horizons Unlimited over the door. She commented blandly, “Sprucin’ up still?”

  Crowe grunted. “Howie wants everything spit on and polished up before the big-wigs get here.”

  “When’s that supposed to be again?”

  Crowe reached for the bilge pump housing. “Any minute now. He sent his own jet for ‘em.”

  Mouzi smiled sourly. “In that case, maybe somebody should do something about the dead body over there.”

  Crowe straightened up, squinting in the direction of her waving hand. “Over where?”

  “There...see them gulls?”

  “How do you know it’s a body?”

  Mouzi shrugged and picked up the socket wrench. “You know how intuitive we South Sea Islanders are.”

  Crowe blew out a disgusted sigh. “Don’t I just.

  Mouzi affected not to notice when Crowe strode across the deck and jumped onto the pier. He shouted toward Chou Lai who straddled his pedicab at the intersection of four footpaths. The two men exchanged words in what she took to be some form of pidgin Cantonese. Reluctantly, Chou Lai pedaled his vehicle toward the hotel.

  Mouzi watched as Chou Lai yelled to the workmen. After a minute, three of them put down their hoses and brushes and trudged toward the canal. Crowe came back aboard and as he stalked past her, he growled, “Conscience of a shark.”

  Mouzi hawked up from deep in her throat and spit over the side. Crowe ignored her expectoration and Mouzi ignored him as he went into the wheelhouse. She knew the big man well enough to pick up on his anger. As a former lieutenant in the United States Navy SEALS, Crowe was no stranger to violence or death, but he preferred not to associate with either if other options were available.

  Mouzi was steeped in the warrior tradition of her people and although she wasn’t of pure Maori blood, she was most definitely proud of what did flow through her veins. Born in a sulphate-scented village on the banks of Lake Ngapouri, she had answered an ad for a tsunami relief service and through it eventually met Augustus Crowe and Jack Kavanaugh.

  Within a month of the meeting, she found herself promoted to the position of chief grease monkey for Horizons Unlimited. Even after Cryptozoica Enterprises had fallen apart, she stayed on Little Tamtung. She had no immediate family anywhere in the world and the island was as good a place to call home as any, certainly better than the ghettos of Rotorua’s Fenton
Street.

  Besides, Kavanaugh needed looking after and Crowe needed a mechanic, even though she hadn’t drawn a paycheck in nearly two years. But the men treated her respectfully most of the time and provided her with a house of her own and enough food to eat, so she didn’t want for much. She and Crowe enjoyed a friends-with-benefits relationship and despite the difference in their ages, she supposed she loved the big man and didn’t care to leave him. Besides, as a bail-jumper and fugitive, she had no great desire to rejoin what passed for civilized society in New Zealand.

  After being arrested for strong-arm robbery in Wellington, Mouzi hid herself in the backwaters of the Third World. She made the acquaintance of twenty-first century pirates, who were always on the prowl for the angle and the profit. Claiming to be representatives tsunami relief organizations provided a good cover for the scavengers.

  Mouzi fell for one of them, a dashing Russian who made a great lover but a terrifying enemy, who would lend her his last dime one night and then break her nose the next because she hadn’t moved fast enough to fetch him a fresh bottle of vodka.

  But from Nikolai and his Mafiya confederates, Mouzi learned how to be a shark swimming in those turbid waters—to bite fast and ruthlessly when the occasion called for it.

  Cutting the throat of Dai Chinnah had not disturbed her emotional equilibrium overmuch. The Papuan seaman reminded her of the man who raped her shortly before her fourteenth birthday. Mouzi had cut his throat too, some weeks later when she came across him drunk and belligerent outside of a bar.

  She had stabbed two of his friends in the same melee but she never knew if she had killed them—nor did she give much of a damn.

  “Looks like they found somebody,” Crowe intoned. “Surprise, surprise.”

  Mouzi squinted across the harborside. The workmen hauled up a limp human shape from the canal water by a length of rope. She said quietly, “Poor bastard must’ve had an accident.”