“I can be mindful of the spirit of our traditions without adhering to the substance of them. We have kept many centuries worth of knowledge hidden from traditional science, have we not?”
With the silver ferrule of his walking stick, Belleau pointed to the bookshelves, moving it from left to right. “There we have forty-two sacred writings by Hermes Trismegistus, his so-called Emerald Tablets that encapsulate all the training of ancient Egyptian priests, rescued from temple of Neith by students of Plato…there are the alchemical tomes of Henry Cornelius Agrippa and the damned texts of Giordano Bruno, smuggled from his home on the very day he was burnt at the stake in Rome as a heretic.
“There are the notations of Paracelsus regarding the Philosopher’s Stone, the Enochnian alphabet as translated by John Dee and the formula of the elixir vitae concocted by the Comte de Saint-Germain, and much, much more.”
He jabbed the tip of his cane at Haining like an accusing finger. “All of those men whose writings we have in our possession postulated the existence of Prima Materia, the primitive formless base of all organic matter. But due only to the foresight of my great-great-grandfather, the School of Night has had an actual sample of it in our possession for nearly two centuries.”
“Yes, we’re all aware of Jacque Belleau’s contribution,” said McArdle impatiently. “You’ve reminded us of it often enough over the last twenty-five years.”
Francis Dee sniffed. “Belleau only acted upon my ancestor’s code-breaking discoveries. It could have been any scholar of the School.”
Belleau ignored the jibe. “I want the sample and the journal of the
Beagle
. If I’m to convince Honoré Roxton of the importance of our undertaking, I will need proof, visual aids at the very least.”
Haining stared at him with incredulous eyes. “Do you mean to remove them from our hall?”
“Why not? We wouldn’t even have a hall or the support of the museum if not for my influence.”
“But if they should be lost or stolen—” Wadley broke off, unable to utter the awful implications.
Belleau grinned. “Oh, pooh. At this point, they serve no real purpose except as artifacts, trophies in our collection, two more items hidden from public eyes in our private repository.”
Frowning, McArdle said, “We have a file containing photographs of the life-forms on Cryptozoica, taken at the blind in the early 1900s...the ones shown to Doyle. That should suffice to convince her.”
“She will reject them as fakes, Photoshop forgeries. No, Honoré Roxton will require proof a bit more substantial.”
The four men exchanged questioning glances. After a long, awkward silence, Haining turned toward Belleau. “I am opposed to this, but we need no further dissension. You may have what you request, but their safety is solely your responsibility. Do you accept that?”
Belleau shrugged. “Of course.”
Haining nodded in McArdle’s direction. “Gregor, you’re the most able-bodied among us. If you would be so kind—”
Not bothering to swallow his sigh of aggravation, McArdle rose and strode across the room to the library ladder. Belleau watched him wheel it over to the shelf to the right of Darwin’s bust. He couldn’t help but smile in triumph.
Noticing the smile, Dee said bitterly, “You’re an ambitious man, Aubrey, but usually your ambitions coincide with the interests of the school. I’m not sure of your motives this time...particularly since you brokered the deal between Maxiterm Pharmaceuticals and that ridiculous ecotourism scheme of Flitcroft. Am I correct in assuming the company still holds you responsible for their losses?”
Belleau’s face feigned hurt feelings. “You wound me, Francis. I don’t inquire as to the source of your disposable income or how your gambling debts are always paid.”
Wadley said quietly, “I’m glad you find such entertainment in this, Aubrey. I, for one suspect we’re making a tragic mistake.”
“As do I,” Haining said in his reedy voice. His eyes glinted with malicious amusement. “We’ve certainly made them before in regards to the Tamtungs. But assuming there is such a thing as a moral balance in the universe, the consequences of this mistake will be restricted to falling upon your head alone.”
Belleau did not respond. He was barely able to keep himself from spitting at the old man. The School of Night was composed of sterile intellectuals, doddering old pedants. Despite all of their knowledge and staggeringly high IQs, none of them had accepted the fact that morality was relative, only a variable, not an absolute.
What constituted sin in one culture could very well be a virtue in another. Belleau knew with soul-deep certainty that objective morality existed only as his means to accomplish an end.
Grunting with effort, McArdle tugged a dark green metal case from the top shelf, two feet long by two wide. The lid was secured by a clasp and a small padlock. Hugging the case to his chest, the bearded man slowly climbed down the ladder, the flat rungs creaking beneath his weight. He carried it over to the table and with an almost reverent care, laid down the case before Belleau.
Fingers trembling, he lifted his stickpin and inserted the eye-within-the-pyramid insignia into the base of the padlock. He twisted it to the right and for a long moment of frustration and fright, it did not turn. Then, with a faint click, the lock popped open.
Slowly, he raised the lid, aware of his colleagues craning their necks to see within, even though all of them were familiar with the contents. With both hands, Belleau lifted out a slim, leather-bound book, the dark front cover bearing no title or markings of any kind. He flipped aside the cover. Affixed to the underside by a metal clamp was a glass vial four inches long and no thicker than his middle finger. Soldered metal and wax served as a seal.
When Belleau plucked the tube from the clamp, both Haining and McArdle drew in sharp, apprehensive breaths. A kind of sobbing, crooning moan came from Wadley’s lips. Revolving the vial between thumb and forefinger, he held it up to the light.
A grayish-green gel half-filled the glass tube. Belleau tilted it to the right, then to the left. The thick, semi-liquid substance oozed to and fro. Tiny bubble-laced streaks formed within it, little jeweled patterns that looked almost pretty.
In a husky whisper, Belleau said, “The bioplasm is still in the same condition as when I first saw it upon my induction into the school…there has been no change in its molecular density or color, almost as if it were dipped from the pool in the last hour, instead of over a hundred and seventy years ago.”
Wadley, Haining, McArdle and Dee stared at the gel with rapt eyes. Haining husked out, “There’s no reason why it should change…it is primordial ooze, the Prima Materia from which all substances on Earth were formed. What is within that container is the vita force, the source of all life itself, unchanged and unchanging after six billion years.”
In a voice quavering with awe, Dee quoted a passage from the Emerald Tablets:
“ ‘All things owe their existence to the Only One, so all things owe their origin to the One Only Thing.' ”
The vial of Prima Materia within Belleau’s fingers exuded not just a sense of antiquity but a vibration of pulsing force that surrounded him with a tingling, buoyant web. The vibration clung to him, caressing his nerve endings, slipping through his mind in tiny, rippling waves of excruciatingly pleasurable fire.
“The sperm of the Earth,” murmured Belleau.
Just holding the Prima Materia made him feel like a god.
May 10
th
, The Island of Little Tamtung
Kavanaugh did not know how long he had been running or when the sun went down or when he stumbled and fell into the bed of wet ferns. All he knew was that he feared the night. The screeching of the archeopteryx and the grunting of an animal somewhere in the vine-shrouded wilderness terrified him.
He knew he was being hunted. The beating of wings and the snarls of the raptor mingled with the crash of the surf beyond the tangled thicket. There was a madness in the noises that gave little comfort to the insanity lurking in the shadows of his mind. He thought he heard voices mixed in with the other sounds, but they were garbled and he could make no sense of them.
The voices frightened him. They seemed louder than the screeching of the archeopteryx and the growls of the Deinonychus. One voice shouted directly into his ear, the words filtering into his brain so vividly the individual letters flashed with color, red for blood, yellow for danger.
“Get up, Jack! Get up and run or you will die.”
Kavanaugh was too afraid to get up, much less run. If the archeopteryx saw him, it would call to the Deinoncychus and he would be disemboweled, his guts unwound, just like Jessup, Cranston and Shah Nikwan. A man-shaped figure moved slowly into his field of vision, limping as if crippled. A high-pitched whistle vibrated against his eardrums, like the trilling of birdsong, and he heard a faint, dry rustling. Light gleamed dully from an intricate pattern of tiny, glittering scales.
The figure stood taller than he, taller even than Augustus, erect upon thick-thewed legs. From down-sloping shoulders dangled long arms, the five fingers tipped with spurs of discolored bone. The neck was very long, supporting a narrow, elongated skull with a nose that consisted of a pair of flaring slits. The pronounced maxillary bones gave the impression of a blunt muzzle. Under knobbed brow ridges, the eyes gleamed golden with opalescent irises, bisected by vertical black slits. The loose flesh at the juncture of its underjaw and throat pulsed.
Kavanaugh stared, transfixed, into those eyes. He heard a faint, agonized groan and distantly realized it had been torn from his own lips. The fathomless eyes held him captive, peering deep into the roots of his soul.
Get up, Jack!
the creature sang to him.
Get up and run or you will die
.
Kavanaugh got up and ran toward the brief flares of light, reaching for them as if he were a child trying to catch fireflies. The flashes took on the appearances of faces that somehow resembled his mother, his father, his brother, and his ex-wife Laurel, all at the same time. He had a dim, faraway awareness that he had broken promises to those faces, but he couldn’t remember what they were.
If you return, you will die.
Then he felt an insistent, prodding pressure against his right rib cage. It wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t pleasant. He tried to roll away from it, but he couldn’t seem to move. Finally, he realized a hard object was pressing against him. Reaching down, his fingers closed on something that felt like the damp toe of a deck shoe.
“Rise and shine, Cap’n K. Howie Flitcroft and his flunkies wait for no one.”
Kavanaugh struggled to open one eye. Crowe’s scowling mahogany face filled his field of vision. He looked distorted, like a ferocious tribal mask viewed under a magnifying glass.
Coughing, clearing his throat, Kavanaugh massaged his eyes with the heels of both hands. They felt as if they had been filled with hot sand. “Flitcroft is here?”
“About ten minutes ago, him and Pendlebury. I guess they expected you to be waiting in the office.”
“What time is it?”
“A little after eight.”
“AM?”
Crowe sighed, holding up the empty bourbon bottle. He pinged a fingernail against the glass. “Of course, dipshit. You weren’t drunk for a whole goddamn night and day. I wouldn’t be surprised if you pulled a bender like that in the future, but so far your problem drinking pattern consists of getting drunk, passing out and waking up the next morning with a hangover, wanting to know what time it is.”
“What a coincidence,” Kavanaugh croaked, “sort of like now.” He realized he was lying on his daybed, still wearing his jeans and boots.
“You really ought to stick to Guinness…it’s a food source. There’s all kinds of vitamins and essential minerals in it. There’s nothing remotely nutritious in bourbon.”
Kavanaugh forced himself into a sitting position, his temples pounding. “Yeah, well, you know how I am about my figure.”
Getting his arms under him, Kavanaugh heaved his body off the daybed, not even trying to stifle his groans. Pain ripped at the walls of his skull, like a clawed animal trying to escape a box. He stumbled into the tiny bathroom and ran a sink full of tepid water. He plunged his face repeatedly into it, blowing like a whale.
“Want some breakfast?” Crowe called. “Mouzi is frying up some fresh oysters.”
Kavanaugh’s stomach boiled like a percolator and face submerged, he mumbled, “You’re hell on a hangover.”
“Kill or cure, Jack.”
Kavanaugh fought back his nausea. After his headache abated a bit, he straightened up and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. He flinched at the sight. His eyes were dark-rimmed and netted with red. His complexion was like mildewed drywall, his jawline bristling with three days worth of whiskers. However, Kavanaugh took a bit of satisfaction in knowing he looked exactly as he felt—like a man who had started drinking early the evening before and kept it up all night.
Squeezing a dollop of toothpaste onto his tongue, he swished it around his mouth, then swallowed it. Pawing through the pile of dirty laundry on the floor, he found a T-shirt that didn’t smell as if it had been used a burial shroud for a dead skunk and he pulled it on. After finger-combing his hair, he decided he was about as presentable as he was going to be, under the present circumstances.
He returned to the living room, noting sourly that although Crowe wasn’t dressed appreciably different than he had been the night before, he at least looked and smelled fresh.
Crowe eyed him critically. “That’s what you’re wearing to the meeting?”
Kavanaugh gestured to the man’s fray-cuffed jeans, the tank top bearing the seal of Temple University Girl’s Volleyball Team and the fisherman’s cap. “Is that what you’re wearing?”
Crowe shrugged. His exposed arms and upper chest showed four puckered bullet scars, inflicted during his short career as a lieutenant in the Navy SEALs. Like Kavanaugh, the man bore other scars beneath his shirt and on the backside of his psyche.
“Uniform of the day,” Crowe drawled. “What’s your excuse except that a forty-two year old man still doesn’t know how to operate a washing machine?”
“Neither do you,” retorted Kavanaugh resentfully. “Mouzi does
your
laundry.”
Crowe snorted. “If she did, do you think I’d be wearing this rig?”
Assuming the question to be rhetorical, Kavanaugh did not answer.
Slipping on a pair of sunglasses, he moved toward the door, “Let’s go. Maybe Pendlebury will have made some coffee.”
The morning sky melted, pouring down heat. Crowe put on dark glasses as well. Wings flapped overhead and Kavanaugh glimpsed the green plumage of Huang Luan, the archeopteryx.
“That goddamn thing is stalking me,” he said bitterly.
Crowe squinted upward, shielding his eyes with his hands. “You’re crazy.”
Kavanaugh didn’t argue with the observation. “I got to get some money…got to get back to the world. Make it or borrow it so I can get the fuck out of here.”
“Borrow against what?”
Kavanaugh gestured behind him. “My house.”
“Nobody would want that shit shack.” Crowe shook his head in disgust. “You’re pathetic on top of being crazy.”
Kavanaugh inhaled deeply. The air was heavy with the smell of the sea. In the full light of day, both men were reminded again of how quickly Little Tamtung had deteriorated from a prospective A-list tourist resort destination to just another moldy settlement on an insignificant island in the South China Sea.
It wasn’t much of a town, although a sincere effort and a lot of money had been expended to build one. On the harborside stretched a paradise of white sandy beach, leaning palm trees and a dark mangrove swamp. The village center itself was a sprawl of white prefab storefronts, souvenir shops and restaurants. Almost all of them were closed, the windows boarded up.
Water-filled holes pitted the narrow streets. Although most of the buildings were barely three years old, they seemed to have wilted at the edges, like the big decorative flowerbeds planted at all the intersections. In the tropics, decay was often swifter than growth. Overnight, mold bristled on a wet shoe, in a few hours, a body could rot, in a few weeks, a weak personality might fall apart.
Still, when Kavanaugh and Crowe had first seen the island, both men felt that no new city could have had a more picturesque setting. A narrow river flowed through the town, streaming down from the tropical uplands. Four red-lacquered Thai-style footbridges spanned it. The brightly colored bridges as well as the flowerbeds had been Bai Suzhen’s idea, as were the stone Chinese lanterns along the walks.
The waterfront area was still in reasonable repair. It extended outward into the bay on a green, grassy promontory. Beyond a cluster of tin-roofed houses on stilts, they saw Flitcroft’s big DHC-6 Otter twin-engine amphibian tethered to the end of a long concrete jetty. Men clustered around the rear fuselage, unloading boxes from the cargo hold. The jetty had been built to serve as a debarkation and customs terminal. It led to a four-story white stucco building, set in the center of a lawn adorned with royal palm trees.
Although the words Cryptozoica Enterprises & Horizons Unlimited were whitewashed over on the façade above the double doors, the letters could still be made out when a shaft of morning sunshine fell directly onto them.
The few people Kavanaugh and Crowe encountered along the waterfront walkways were mainly fisher-folk and they wore mixed Asian and Western attire. Only one of them, a young man on a pedi-cab greeted them: “Mornin’, Skipper, mornin’, Tombstone.”
Kavanaugh ignored him. Like every other would-be entrepreneur on Little Tamtung, Chou Lai blamed Kavanaugh for the failure of his business—in his case, Cryptozoica pedicabs and sightseeing.
The freighter,
Mindanao’s Folly,
was gone from the harbor, so either Dai Chinnah’s body had been recovered or Captain Hellstrom decided he wasn’t worth the effort of looking for it and weighed anchor at dawn.
Humidity hung over the waterfront like a shroud, insufferably oppressive. Although the Tamtung islands resembled a pair of mythical Bali Hai paradises from afar, close up they stunk of dead fish, mud and the eternal heat of the tropics. The jungled bulk of Cryptozoica rising from the sea looked beautiful, too, but things with fangs and talons and appetites for blood crept among the colorful flowers.
The building that had housed the headquarters of Cryptozoica Enterprises and Horizons Unlimited Tours had been designed to perform double-duty as a four-star hotel, the entrance of which faced the sea. Augustus Crowe and Jack Kavanaugh entered through the office annex.
All of the furniture had long ago been removed from the big reception area, but glossy framed posters emblazoned with the bright yellow Cryptozoica logo still hung on the walls, each one displaying a different scenario and habitat of the proposed spa and clinic.
The Jacuzzi, pool and steam baths were at the rear of the building.
They heard the murmur of voices from a corner office and they followed the sounds down a short hallway. Howard Flitcroft glanced up from a desk stacked high with papers, from release forms to brochures. Although the window was propped open and a ceiling fan spun, the air smelled musty and old. Flitcroft made an exaggerated show of consulting his platinum Rolex and arched his eyebrows.
“Right on time,” Kavanaugh said blandly. “As usual.”
“I was about to commend you on your punctuality,” Flitcroft retorted dryly. “And also bring to your attention that you look and smell like a walking dog turd.”
Kavanaugh shrugged. “Thanks. I wasn’t sure. Good thing you’ve got personal groomers following you around, right? No telling when a Forbes magazine photographer might jump out at you in a dark boardroom.”
Bertram Pendlebury glared at him over the thick sheaf of papers in his arms. “Keep in mind who you’re talking to, Jack! You owe him big.”
Pendlebury was Flitcroft’s right hand man, a position he secured when Flitcroft married Bertram’s sister, Merriam. A thin man with short dark hair streaked through with badger stripes of gray, he wore a tropical print shirt three sizes too large for him.
“Suck up when you’re ordered to suck, Smithers,” Kavanaugh shot back.
Flitcroft snapped, “Enough of that…from everybody.”
Both Kavanaugh and Pendlebury fell silent. Flitcroft wasn’t a tall man, but he wasn’t small either. Husky of build and in his early fifties, Howard Philips Flitcroft looked more like a high school PE teacher from an Iowa town than a millionaire several times over.