The Chimera Secret Page 5

  ‘Jesus,’ Lopez muttered. ‘It’s like Pan’s Labyrinth in here.’

  Ethan leaned close to one of the glass jars, peering in at what looked like a cross between a baby hippo and an alligator, suspended in some kind of embalming fluid. Small, black eyes squinted vacantly back at him from within the jar, which had a yellowing label affixed to one side.

  Ivory Coast, 1874

  Lopez peered in at the strange foetus. ‘Whatever the hell that is, I’m glad it didn’t get the chance to grow up.’

  Ethan glanced around the laboratory, dust motes glinting in the sunlight beaming through the windows. The beams hit a painting on one wall that depicted what looked like a Spanish galleon being crushed in the grip of an immense octopus, terrified sailors hurling themselves from the ship’s rigging into a tumultuous sea.

  To his left were row upon row of specimen jars that held a thousand different species, all of them looking as though they had come from another planet. The darkest recesses at the back of the laboratory harboured shadowy forms like demons sheltering from the light, deformed skeletons and grotesque skulls peering as though from the gates of Hades.

  Then Ethan looked up.

  ‘Holy crap,’ he uttered out loud.

  Suspended from the ceiling beams was a skeleton of bleached bones that Ethan reckoned must be at least fifty feet long, its remains looping back and forth across the ceiling in order to fit it all in. There was no mistaking what it looked like. Yet the only problem for him was that what it looked like was a creature from the fantasies of science-fiction authors, the long and undulating body of a fish tipped with the head of some kind of shark.

  ‘It looks like a sea serpent,’ Lopez said as she gazed up at the remains.

  The reply came from the doorway behind them. ‘That’s because it is a sea serpent.’

  Ethan turned to see a small man with a wizened face and short gray hair smiling at him from behind half-moon spectacles. Professor Middleton stepped into the laboratory, taking off his spectacles and polishing the lenses on his shirt as he examined the monstrosity looming above them.

  ‘It’s a Regalecus glesne, otherwise known as the giant oarfish,’ he explained. ‘This one was caught in the nets of a trawler off the coast of California in 1996 and acquired by me for the university. They can grow twice as large, although none that size have been captured. Yet.’

  Jarvis introduced Middleton to Ethan and Lopez. The professor was a world-recognized expert in the subject of cryptozoology.

  ‘I thought that cryptozoology wasn’t considered a valid scientific discipline,’ Ethan said. ‘Pseudo-science, I think biologists call it.’

  Middleton smiled ruefully as he replaced his spectacles and pointed up at the enormous oarfish above them.

  ‘Do you think that’s pseudo-science?’ he challenged, but his blue eyes were bright with delight. ‘Mr. Warner, throughout history people have recorded sightings of creatures so bizarre that the witnesses were dismissed as hoaxers or drunks. It has become common discipline to dismiss anything considered too out of the ordinary by science. Solid, incontrovertible evidence is required before any self-respecting researcher will even begin to consider the existence of a new species that defies conventional description.’

  Jarvis took up Middleton’s line.

  ‘Over the past couple of decades there have been some studies conducted into the existence of creatures that used to be the stuff of myth. The reason that the scientific community has begun to embrace the possibility of these animals being real is the ubiquity of video cameras on cellphones. For the first time in history, people can actually prove that what they said they saw was real.’

  ‘Or not,’ Middleton cautioned. ‘Many honest people have been genuinely fooled by natural phenomena or misidentification of ordinary creatures under unusual lighting conditions or at great distance. That said, sometimes what they see is truly terrifying even when it’s not a new species.’

  ‘Such as?’ Lopez asked, intrigued.

  ‘Well,’ Middleton shrugged, ‘a few years back somebody claimed to have footage of a giant black beast running across the wilderness in Dartmoor, England. The footage was analyzed by experts and was confirmed to be a rare black lion, an adult male and a big one at that. Obviously it’s not a species native to that island, but you’re still talking about a four-hundred-pound killing machine running wild out there. You can understand where the legends of a beast roaming the moors came from. It’s not hard to imagine people being hunted down and killed by a giant African cat.’

  ‘But how could it have gotten there?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘The Kings of England often kept big cats in the Tower of London as spectator attractions and symbols of wealth and power,’ Jarvis said. ‘Many of them escaped over the years. There was also a craze in the seventies for keeping exotic big cats as pets. When the government there changed the laws to prevent people owning dangerous animals, the owners turned their animals loose into the wild. Of course there weren’t enough of them to maintain a true breeding population else they’d have been documented by now. But individual animals within huge tracts of wilderness and with an ample food supply could survive for years.’

  Ethan glanced uncertainly at Jarvis. ‘Why are you telling us about this?’

  ‘You’re being sent to Idaho to interview a man named Jesse MacCarthy, who is currently being held by the Sheriff’s Department on suspicion of homicide.’

  ‘Who did he kill?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘Well, that’s the question: did he actually kill anyone?’ Jarvis said. ‘Jesse MacCarthy’s case was picked up by the FBI because Jesse claimed his brother Cletus had been killed in the forests outside of Riggins, Idaho, along with a Ranger by the name of Coltz. Because Riggins sits near the border of Oregon, Montana and Washington State, and Jesse was so incoherent when he was found, the sheriff couldn’t figure out for sure where Cletus was when he died. They had to assume the case might have crossed borders so they called the Bureau in.’

  ‘Which is where you come in, right?’ Lopez suggested.

  ‘The DIA picked up the case after the FBI rejected it. Turns out that not only did Cletus MacCarthy die in the woods, but a third brother, Randy, was found hanged in his garage the following morning. The Bureau’s agents on site decided that Jesse must have killed both of his brothers in some catastrophic mental breakdown. Apparently he was suffering panic attacks for about twenty-four hours after he was found, so the mental instability figures.’

  ‘Why would the FBI drop it so quickly?’ Ethan puzzled. ‘Two deaths in twenty-four hours in the same family is suspicious, but I take it there’s no smoking gun tying Jesse to the killings otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Not exactly a smoking gun,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Jesse has claimed repeatedly to local law enforcement and the Bureau that he knew nothing of Randy’s death. But he also insisted that his other brother, Cletus, whose body has not yet been found, was killed by a monster in the forests.’

  The room remained silent for a moment.

  ‘A monster,’ Lopez echoed flatly.

  ‘His exact words,’ Jarvis confirmed.

  Ethan thought for a moment. ‘There’s got to be more to it than that.’

  ‘Not for the Bureau,’ Jarvis said. ‘But when I got the case I took a better look at it. There are several things that don’t add up. Randy’s estimated time of death is stated as being the same time that Jesse was supposedly out in the forests. Of course he could have lied about where he was, killing both brothers in the same time frame, except that when he was found his clothes were torn to shreds and he was on the verge of cardiac arrest. The doctors who treated him diagnosed extreme dehydration and exhaustion, which backed up his story.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘That Cletus was killed somewhere near a place called Fox Creek in the mountains to the east of Riggins. It’s almost twenty miles away from the town through severe terrain, and Jesse swears his brother was killed the previous evening.’


  Ethan got it immediately.

  ‘He ran twenty miles, at night, through the mountains?’

  ‘Non-stop,’ Jarvis confirmed. ‘Whatever he saw, it scared him enough to flee so far and so fast that it almost killed him.’

  8

  In his time with the United States Marines, Ethan had been put through some severe physical challenges that had tested the limits of his endurance. That was just part of a soldier’s life, accepted by all who served. But for a civilian with no prior history of extreme physical endurance to run for twelve hours across wild ground was an almost superhuman feat.

  ‘So Jesse gets back to civilization,’ Ethan said, ‘finds somebody and tells them a monster killed his brother.’

  Jarvis nodded.

  ‘He’s taken to hospital, but after a few hours the Sheriff’s Office arrests him in connection with his brother’s death. No motive had been found but Jesse won’t shift from his story, which has been digging him further into trouble.’

  ‘You want us to go in and figure it out,’ Lopez guessed. ‘You really sure this guy’s worth all the trouble? What’s that scientific rule – Occam’s Razor? You don’t introduce one mystery to explain another. It’s more likely that Jesse killed his brothers and concocted a crazy story to throw the police off the scent.’

  Ethan’s gaze drifted up to the writhing skeletal coils above his head.

  ‘True,’ he agreed, ‘but Idaho is big bear country. Why invent a story about a monster when he could just have said a bear got his brother? And if Jesse did murder them both then why come back at all? Why not stay out in the woods a while, then come back as if nothing’s happened?’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Professor Middleton said. ‘There is no good reason for Jesse MacCarthy to falsely claim a monster killed his brother. Nor could he possibly have faked the damage done to his body in his flight from those mountains. The simplest explanation, Miss Lopez, is that he saw something that terrified him almost to death.’

  ‘Couldn’t he have seen a bear though?’ Lopez suggested. ‘Been mistaken?’

  Jarvis shook his head.

  ‘Two of the three MacCarthy brothers were experienced woodsmen and hunters, taught by their father. Jesse was the youngest but he knew the region like the back of his hand: well enough, if we assume he’s told the truth, to find his way home in the dead of night while in a state of blind panic. These guys knew what bears looked like. But that’s not what intrigues us the most.’

  Middleton pushed his spectacles further up onto his nose as he took his cue. ‘This has happened before.’

  ‘To whom?’ Lopez asked.

  ‘A celebrity, believe it or not,’ Middleton explained. ‘Spirit Lake, near Mount St. Helens in Washington State, May 1950. Championship skier Jim Carter vanished without trace from a twenty-strong climbing party after diverting from the group in order to take photographs. He left the other climbers near a landmark called Dog’s Head, in good weather at the eight-thousand-foot level, to take a picture of the group as they skied down. That was the last time anyone saw him. The next morning searchers found a discarded film box at the point where he had taken a picture.’

  ‘So?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘Carter had left ski tracks in the snow going down the mountain,’ Middleton said, ‘that recorded a wild and death-defying flight. He took chances no professional skier would take, going like the devil and leaping crevasses. His companions claimed that he would only ever have done that if he was in genuine fear of his life. He eventually reached Ape Canyon and skied straight down the canyon wall, such was his evident terror. Yet his body was not found at the bottom.’

  ‘Seattle Mountain Search and Rescue combed the canyon for five days,’ Jarvis continued, ‘but no sign of Carter or his equipment was ever found.’

  ‘During the search,’ Middleton went on, ‘the rescuers reported feelings of being watched on the mountain, and agreed that there was something strange up on the high slopes of the Cascades. There have been about twenty-five different reports of people attacked by apelike men in the St. Helens and Cascade areas over a twenty-year period. One was a group of Boy Scouts from Centralia. Several were taken off the mountain in a hysterical state after claiming they had been attacked by what they called mountain devils.’

  Ethan turned to Professor Middleton.

  ‘I take it that you think that whatever attacked Jim Carter also attacked Cletus and Jesse MacCarthy. Do you have any idea what it was?’

  Middleton walked further down into the laboratory and picked up what looked to Ethan like a large slab of cement. The professor heaved it into the light and set it down on a nearby wooden table with a thump that sent little clouds of dust curling up into the sunbeams.

  Ethan stepped forward and looked down at the huge plaster cast.

  The depressions set into the cast marked the surface of what must have been a shallow pool or perhaps the bed of a stream, ripples of sand clearly formed by flowing water speckled with small pebbles and a grainy texture. But in the center of the cast was the unmistakeable shape of an enormous footprint. A plastic measuring gauge was glued along the edge of the cast, and he could see that it measured just less than seventeen inches.

  ‘This cast,’ Middleton said, ‘was made from a trail of fresh prints that ran along a watercourse in Umatilla National Forest, Washington State. The inferred weight of the creature that left this print, measured by the density of the riverbed at the time, was in excess of seven hundred pounds.’

  Lopez squinted down at the print. ‘It looks human.’

  ‘Yes it does,’ Middleton nodded, ‘and yet at the same time, it isn’t. The step length of the creature that created this track was almost two metres, far greater than that of a human being. Moreover, details in the print reveal a compliant gait on a flat foot, compared to the human method of walking which uses a stiff-legged stride with distinct heel and toe phases. Essentially, this creature walks with a bent knee, using its legs like shock-absorbers and rolling the foot to keep the torso level. Humans bounce a little when we walk – this creature does not.’

  ‘Couldn’t it be a fake?’ Ethan suggested. ‘Some jerk with boards strapped to his feet?’

  ‘No,’ Middleton said as he gestured to details in the cast, ‘because it would be physically impossible to model all of the tiny variables we see in prints like this. The roll of the foot through the sand that created these mid-tarsal pressure ridges; the slight slip of the ball that has pushed the sand backward behind the heel; and here,’ Middleton pointed to fine lines in the base of the print, ‘evidence of dermatoglyphics, like fingerprints, the faint ridges in the surface of the skin of all primates.’

  ‘You’re saying that an ape created this?’ Lopez said. ‘Like a gorilla?’

  ‘A bipedal ape,’ Middleton corrected her, ‘sometimes known as sasquatch, or Bigfoot.’

  Ethan stared at the print for a long moment before speaking.

  ‘You think that Jesse MacCarthy’s brother was killed by a Bigfoot? It’s no wonder the FBI walked away from the case.’

  ‘And even if it were true,’ Lopez said, ‘what the hell do you expect us to do about it? Head into the mountains and bring our homicidal Bigfoot back to trial? This is crazy. What possible interest can the DIA have in this?’

  Jarvis gestured to the cast.

  ‘The department’s interest at this point is purely coincidental. The murder of Randy MacCarthy is an open and recent case, and having become involved we’ve been given tacit approval to head up there. Solve the murder and the case gets closed as far as the DIA is concerned. I’d like you to push a little further and find out what you can about what really happened to Cletus and Jesse.’

  Ethan sighed and shook his head.

  ‘Okay, but don’t hold your breath for any spectacular discoveries this time. There have been people scouring the forests for sasquatch for centuries and nobody’s found a thing. For me, the idea of a giant hairy human wandering about in the forests is
about as close to myth as we’re likely to get.’

  Professor Middleton’s eyes hardened behind his spectacles as he looked at Ethan.

  ‘Perhaps your scepticism, although healthy, is both misplaced and out of date, Mr. Warner,’ he warned. ‘We humans are apes ourselves, primates, closely related to our cousins, the chimpanzees and gorillas. Our own lineage, that of the order Homo, until a hundred thousand years ago consisted of several different species of human wandering the earth.’

  ‘Seriously?’ Lopez asked. ‘I thought it was only us?’

  ‘The Neanderthals were a different species,’ Ethan said. ‘As were Homo heidelbergensis and Homo erectus, but they all walked the earth at the same time as us, Homo sapiens. Our species overlapped in their ranges and likely came face to face often.’

  ‘Impressive,’ Professor Middleton said, raising an eyebrow. ‘Your knowledge of human evolution is remarkably astute.’

  ‘I learned a few things about the origin of life in Israel a while back,’ Ethan said without elaborating, unwilling right now to think too hard about the Gaza Strip and the things that had occurred there years before. ‘But all of our competing species died out, became extinct. We, Homo sapiens, are the only ones left.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Middleton asked rhetorically.

  Jarvis gestured to an image pinned to the wall of the laboratory, that of a clearly human face with a thick beard and long, lank black hair. The eyes seemed too large for the face and the brow ridge was pronounced, almost like that of an ape, while the nasal bridge was wide and flat with large nostrils.

  ‘The island of Flores, 2003,’ he said. ‘A team working in the deep jungles researching the migration of ancient Homo sapiens around the world unexpectedly discovered an entirely new species of human, Homo floresiensis, the remains of which were found in a place called Liang Bua Cave. Evidence of extensive tool production, use of fire, cooking and eating confirmed the species as effectively a modern human, but there was one major difference.’