by Mark Ellis
Bai shrugged, eyeing Honoré and Kavanaugh standing shoulder-to-shoulder. “There are stranger partnerships, I suppose. Bert said to meet him on the beach in about two hours.”
“How’s your shoulder, Bai?” asked Mouzi.
She pulled aside the collar of her stained, torn blouse and touched the discolored, scabbed over flesh. “It looks like it’s been healing for a month, so the Prima Materia in the vial was still potent. It doesn’t even itch this morning.”
“We can analyze what’s in the pool,” commented Honoré. “Compare it to the traces in the vial, see if there’s been a change on the molecular level.”
Bai Suzhen stretched her arms over her head, arching her back, her breasts thrusting tautly against the silk. “The white serpent of good fortune is prospering at last.”
Gazing levelly at Kavanaugh, she asked softly, “Won’t it be wonderful to lie naked in a tub of ice cubes again?”
Honoré’s eyes narrowed to slits and she cast Kavanaugh a sidewise glance. Rather than respond to Bai’s question or Honoré’s stare, he busied himself checking the cylinder of his revolver.
“I’ll go for just some cool sheets and a soft bed under me,” Mouzi said cheerfully. She rubbed the back of her head and turned a grimace of pain into a grin. “We ought to choreograph this whole thing, put it to music and stage it as a joint tour package production of Cryptozoica Enterprises and Horizons Unlimited.”
“Yeah,” said Crowe dourly. “I can just see the reviews: ‘Great family fun until my wife was disemboweled by a Deinonychus.’”
Nobody laughed. All of them were too tired, dirty, scratched, bruised and battered to find much humor in anything.
As Crowe, Mouzi, Bai Suzhen and Kavanaugh wended their way among the stone columns, Honoré said quietly, “This story is bound to get out, Jack. A man of Aubrey’s standing can’t just go missing without somebody asking questions and I’m the person they’ll be asking them of, since he was last seen in my company.”
“And?”
“And, although I hate to sound like Aubrey, we need to control the release of information and secure this site.”
“Why?”
“The concept of turning Big Tamtung into a living laboratory where the flora and fauna can be studied by qualified people is still a sound one. We can make it the most unique and famous nature preserve in human history.”
He smiled ruefully. “No tourist destination?”
Honoré chuckled. “I’m afraid not, no. Admittance would be restricted. It would have to be…creationists and Darwinists and every fringe belief in between would try to turn Cryptozoica into their own private Mecca to further their agendas. Like Aubrey said, everything is different now. What we think we know about the origin of humanity, of all life on Earth, will have to be re-evaluated."
“Didn’t you say Aubrey worked for a pharmaceutical company?”
“Maxiterm. I think they’re based in Switzerland.”
“They could come calling with their hands out, too.”
“Aubrey denied being involved with them in this undertaking, but I probably shouldn’t take his word for that.”
“It won’t be easy pulling it all together, you know,” Kavanaugh said reflectively. “This is a wild and unstable part of the world. It’s pretty damn lawless, what with pirates and the triads jockeying for position. And if Belleau’s group, that School of Night he talked about, wants to get involved with Big Tamtung again, this could turn into a hell of a mess. Credibility won’t be easy to establish.”
Honoré tugged at the brim of her Stetson. “That’s why I’m willing to be the front-person, Jack, the spokeswoman. I may not have much else going for me, but I do have credibility—and one more thing besides.”
Kavanaugh glanced at her quizzically. “What’s that?”
“A catch-phrase.” She used her hand to place blocks of invisible copy on a transparent billboard. “Cryptozoica—Where the Past Has Not Stopped Breathing.”
Kavanaugh laughed—then he heard a monstrous roar beyond the treeline, a prolonged, eardrum-compressing bellow that seemed to have no fixed point of origin but embodied everything savage, fearsome and ancient about the island.
Everyone came to a halt, bodies tensing, hands gripping weapons. Honoré Roxton glanced around with wide eyes. “What in the name of God was that?”
Quietly, Jack Kavanaugh said, “That was Cryptozoica…where the past hasn’t stopped breathing and can still eat you alive.”
EPILOGUE
May 15
The storm swept through as a wild, howling fury, bringing a hot wind that whirled over the ruins and filled every hole, crevice and crack with rainwater.
Wadjet squatted on her heels beside the Womb of the Earth, hugging her knees. She chewed slowly, noting how the surface of the pool was covered by a layer of wind-torn foliage.
She sat and waited as she had since dawn, impervious to the lash of the wind against her skin, her eyes never leaving the womb. She was used to waiting. Wadjet’s thoughts were not channeled into the measurements of time, since her people had long known the perception of its passage was a subjective phenomenon. Another few hours, days or even years squatting beside the pool made no difference to her.
The leaves on the surface suddenly stirred, bulging upward as if pushed from below. Wadjet did not move, she only chewed and watched. Thunder rumbled, rolling across the island.
A hand thrust up through the scraps of foliage, fingers clawing wildly as if to grasp a fistful of life and light. Skin gleamed whitely beneath the coating of dark sludge.
Reaching out, Wadjet grabbed the wrist and pulled upward. A small body came loose from the embrace of the mire with a protracted, sucking sound.
Gently, she laid out the small man on the collar stones and straightened his limbs, even the under-developed legs. She laid his hands atop his chest, noting the little web-fingered paw sprouting from his right wrist.
The rain sluiced away the muck from his hairless skull. His eyelids fluttered, his chest rose, fell and rose again. Wadjet turned his head to one side and he coughed, spewing out a jet of thick, green-black fluid. His blue eyes opened, staring about in uncomprehending wonder. He inhaled a raspy breath, lips writhing back over toothless gums.
Wadjet removed the piece of raw meat from her mouth and pressed it to the small man’s lips, cradling the back of his head in her hand.
Aubrey Belleau sucked at it greedily.
The Science of Cryptozoica
The Possibility of Dinosaurid Survival:
A growing school of scientific thought postulates that a form of living dinosaurs are not a zoological impossibility, particularly in areas that have been geologically stable for the past sixty million years, since the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event.
Some scientists have put forward arguments that legends and ancient works of traditional art depict dinosaurs interacting with humans, such as the Peruvian Ica stones, not to mention the fossilized footprints of hominid and dinosaurid that were found imbedded in rock strata from the same era. There are frequent reports of sauropods in Africa, notably the Mokele-mbembe and the Iguanodon-like creatures allegedly sighted in New Guinea.
There is of course, the coelacanth, a fish believed to have died out even before the dinosaurs, that is still swimming off the coast of Africa, not to mention a wasp believed extinct for twenty-five million years, that was recently discovered to have survived in California.
Quantum Evolution:
Scientist George Gaylord Simpson conceived a multi-tempoed theory of evolutionary change in the 1940s. According to Simpson, some lineages in the fossil record evolved with extraordinary slowness, others more rapidly. He observed that in most phyletic lines, evolution occurred in a moderate and steady manner, while others showed fluctuating patterns of evolutionary descent. The most rapid of these tempos was dubbed "quantum evolution."
Simpson believed that major evolutionary transitions would arise when small populations—isolated and limite
d from gene flow—would fixate upon unusual gene combinations and maintain them in stable “adaptive peaks.”
Feathered dinosaurids:
A theory that has gained popularity among paleontologists and dinosaurologists is that feathers first evolved as insulating structures on warm-blooded dinosaurs. In the 1970s, Dr. John Ostrum published his work on the Deinonychus, arguing that it possessed many of the features evident in the Archaeopteryx and therefore the theropods—bipedal predatory dinosaurs—were the ancestors of birds.
Anthroposaurs:
Paleontologists have long speculated that the bipedal Troodon, a species of theropod, were separated from other dinosaurs by a gulf comparable to the division between men and cows. If not for the ecological catastrophe at the end of the Cretaceous period, they would have evolved into humanoid dinosaurs. By historical times, their brain size would have been within the human range.
In an experiment conducted in 1982, paleontologist Dale Russell conjectured that the species would have evolved into a humanoid intelligent form not unlike our own. The Troodon had manipulative fingers, opposable thumbs and binocular vision. Russel speculated that like most dinosaurs of the Troodon family, this creature, the anthroposaur, would have had large eyes and three fingers on each hand.
As with most modern reptiles and birds, its genitalia would have been internal. Russell theorized that it would have required a navel, as a placenta aids the development of a large brain case, however it would not have possessed mammary glands, and would have fed its young, as birds do, on regurgitated food. Its language would have sounded somewhat like bird song.
Prima Materia:
According to Aristotle and alchemical lore, Prima Materia is the primitive formless base of all matter, from which all substances are created. It is considered to be “pure” matter, and it is conjectured to be the same as primordial ooze, which contained ingredients considered essential for the development of life on the planet.
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego's Specialized Center of Research and Training, Exobiologists are studying the abiotic synthesis of biomolecules to determine which ones could have been present on Earth before life arose and, thus, may have been instrumental to the first living organisms.
The research provides evidence for the presence of an important ingredient in the original soup of life. It has been demonstrated that amino acids can form abiotically in a number of ways and are used by modern organisms for the manufacture of proteins. Sugars, however, which are components of modern genetic materials such as DNA or RNA are thought to be too unstable to have been widespread on Earth before life arose. The remaining "Big Question" is how and when did non-living molecules turn into life forms and begin to make copies of themselves, although the study of autocatalysts is providing a new road map.
Autocatalysts are substances which catalyze the reproduction of themselves, and therefore have the property of being a simple molecular replicator.
Enochian Alphabet:
The Enochian language is the name applied to an occult alphabet recorded in the journals of Dr. John Dee in the late 16th century. Dee and his seer, Edward Kelly, claimed that the alphabet was revealed to them by angels.
Although most scholars believe Enochian to be a coded language constructed for the purposes of spying and smuggling secret messages, Dee referred to the alphabet as “Adamical”, claiming it was the language Adam and Eve spoke in the Garden of Eden. He also claimed that Enoch was the last human who could speak, write and read the language, which prompted historians to refer to the language as Enochian.
Some researchers have proposed that the builders of Solomon’s Temple expressed their architectural secrets in Enochian and that the Masonic lodge holds the key to understanding the language.
Acknowledgements
Usually it’s difficult to thank everybody involved in
a project like this, but fortunately this time it’s not a strain. To
the Museum of Natural History in New York City for planting
the seed of Cryptozoica in my mind; to mega-talented Jeff
Slemons for his enthusiasm; to our daughter Deirdre DeLay
Pierpoint; to Wayne Quackenbush, Elizabeth Bell Carroll
and all of the members of the Newport Roundtable; to Jim
Mooney and Darryl Banks; to influences like Doc Savage,
Milton Caniff, I Spy, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John D. Mac-
Donald, Stephen Marlowe, Donald Hamilton, Richard Prather,
Edward S. Aarons and Robert E. Howard; to the fans of
my Outlanders series, particularly Christopher Van Deelen.
And last but definitely not least, Melissa, my wife, editor
and art director, whose painstaking work, support and love
brought Cryptozoica to its present form.
The printed version of Cryptozoica is available at Amazon.com, autographed copies from www.millennialconcepts.com.
Other Books by Mark Ellis
• The Everything Guide to
Writing Graphic Novels
(w/Melissa Martin-Ellis)
• Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze
• Death Hawk: The Soulworm Saga
• The Miskatonic Project: The
Whisperer in Darkness
• The New Justice Machine
• Nosferatu: Plague of Terror
• The Green Hornet Chronicles
• Star Rangers: The Spur
As James Axler:
• Hellfire Trigger
• Devil’s Guard • Stoneface
• Demons of Eden
• Nightmare Passage
• Exile to Hell
• Destiny Run
• Savage Sun
• Omega Path
• Parallax Red
• Doomstar Relic
• Iceblood
• Hellbound Fury (The Lost Earth
Saga, Book 1)
• Night Eternal (The Lost Earth
Saga, Book 2)
• Outer Darkness (The Lost Earth
Saga, Book 3)
• Armageddon Axis
• Encounter
• Shadow Scourge
• Hell Rising
• Doom Dynasty (The Imperator
Wars, Book 1)
• Tigers of Heaven (The Imperator
Wars, Book 2)
• Purgatory Road (The Imperator
Wars, Book 3)
• Tomb of Time
• Devil in the Moon (The Dragon Kings,
Book 1)
• Dragoneye (The Dragon Kings, Book 2)
• Far Empire
• Equinox Zero
• Talon and Fang (Heart of the World,
Book 1)
• Sea of Plague (Heart of the World,
Book 2)
• Mad God's Wrath
• Mask of The Sphinx
• Evil Abyss
• Children of The Serpent
• Cerberus Storm
• Aftermath
• Rim of The World
• Hydra's Ring
• Skull Throne
• Satan's Seed
• Dark Goddess
• Grailstone Gambit
• Ghostwalk
• Warlord of the Pit
Books featuring art by Jeff Slemons:
• Hollow Earth Expedition Sourcebook
• Hollow Earth Expedition: Secrets of
the Surface World Sourcebook
• Luan Moon Hunter
• Armor Quest
• Spectrum 17: The Best in
Contemporary Fantastic Art
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