Lost Worlds
Authors: Andrew Lane
Dedicated to Helen Stirling-Lane, who has brought more light and happiness and contentment to my life than I thought possible. With all my love.
Dedicated also to my agent, Robert Kirby, who has been there for me virtually from the start and who came up with (assisted by his daughter, Maddie Dunne Kirby) many of the
initial ideas, themes and characters in this book. Long may our association continue. Keep those champagne cocktails coming.
And with grateful thanks to Ralph Barraclough, Angela Burgess, Nigel McCrery, Polly Nolan, Sally Oliphant, James Pilborough and Joules Kilgallon, for keeping me sane through a
very stressful period of my life. Thank you all.
one
C
alum Challenger gazed in awe at the image on the computer screen. Well, to be fair, he gazed in awe at the image on the central one of the ten
screens that hung, at different heights, suspended from articulated arms, in front of his work desk. The image was blurred and grainy, but that wasn’t the screen’s fault. His
multi-screen, high-definition, hex-core computer system was the best that money could buy – and despite the fact that he was only sixteen he had access to a lot of money. An
awful
lot
of money. No, the image was blurred and grainy because it had been blown up from a photograph taken with a mobile-phone camera at long range while the subject was moving. Even so, he could just
about see what it was.
He leaned back in his chair. Five years he’d been waiting for an image like this to turn up. Five
years
. Now that it was here, captured in colour on his computer screen, he
wasn’t sure how he should react.
A cold breeze from the darkened expanse of the warehouse behind him caressed the hairs on the back of his neck. He didn’t turn round. He knew that it was just a random gust of wind through
a ventilation grille – the alarm systems would have gone off if anyone had actually broken into the warehouse. He was, as he almost always was these days, alone.
The screen showed a figure against a background of grass, bushes and rocks. Judging by the figure’s shadow, the background was slanted – perhaps a hillside or a slope.
The interesting thing – the thing that had made Calum catch his breath in wonder – was that the figure didn’t look human.
It was difficult to tell its size, with only the heights of the bushes with which to compare it, but Calum got the impression that it was about the size of a large man. It was stooped, with
rounded shoulders and bowed arms that dangled in front of it. Its skin seemed to be covered with short red hair, with the exception of pale lines up its spine, down the inside of its forearms and
beneath its jaw. He could have been looking at a big, hairy man with a stoop, except that the face was different. A thick ridge of brow pushed out over the eyes, like on a chimpanzee, and the teeth
and jaw were pushed out slightly, but a distinct nose projected. Chimpanzees didn’t have noses.
Calum drew a box round the figure’s right hand with a couple of clicks of his trackball, and flicked the section of image inside the box to another of his screens. The result was pixelated
almost to the point of incoherence, but he could just make out what looked like a thumb that was nearly as long as, but separate from, the rest of the fingers, and angled so that it could close
against them. An opposable thumb – that was another thing that ruled out the possibility that it was a chimpanzee. Calum knew that their thumbs were much shorter than the rest of their
fingers, making it easier for them to climb trees. Gorillas had opposable thumbs, but this wasn’t anything like a gorilla. Some Old World monkeys, like mandrills, also had opposable thumbs,
but they were all small – the size of a dog – and there was no way they could be mistaken for human. No, this thing was unique.
He ran his fingers through his long hair and interlaced them at the back of his neck. He supposed it could be a man in a mask and a hairy suit – like that 1967 footage taken in California,
supposedly showing an ape-like creature locally known as Sasquatch, but which had turned out to be a hoax. That was the problem with these blurry photographs or jerky video clips – they could
so easily be hoaxes. And yet . . . its forearms seemed longer in proportion to its upper arms, and to the rest of its body. Reduced to a silhouette, it just didn’t
look
human. If the
creature was a hoax, then it was a very well-constructed one.
The creature
. He laughed suddenly, and the laughter echoed back to his ears from the cold brick walls of the warehouse. He was already thinking of it as
the creature
. Just a few
moments ago it had been
the figure
. Somewhere in his mind, it seemed that he had already made a decision about the photograph’s likely authenticity.
He could sense his heart beating faster than normal. He felt slightly light-headed. Off in the distance the sound of London traffic drifted through the ventilation grilles, but Calum
couldn’t hear it. Mentally, he was listening again to his father’s voice, deep and comforting, echoing over the gulf of time from five years before.
‘
You know, Calum, the original human species in northern Europe and central Asia was the Neanderthal. They were slow-moving creatures: large heads, bulbous foreheads and covered in
hair. They were organized in clans, often living in caves, and had the intelligence to make fire and use tools. However, out of central Africa, at a time of particularly low sea levels, came
Homo sapiens
– “thinking man” – our direct ancestors. They were descended from tree-dwelling apes and were smaller, more agile, intelligent and inventive. There was
probably a time when the Neanderthals and
Homo sapiens
made room for each other, but, as the
sapiens
culture expanded, battles must have been fought for land and food and gradually
the Neanderthals were driven to more mountainous and inhospitable regions and eventually, or so it’s believed, made extinct. Remember the stories I told you about how American settlers
treated Native American Indians? Or how Canadian settlers treated the Inuit, or Australians the Aborigines, or New Zealanders the Maori? The list goes on. It’s a similar pattern. It’s
the spread of the dominant culture and the destruction of the weaker. But what interests me, Calum – and your mother, probably rightly, thinks I’m crazy – is the possibility that
Neanderthal man may have continued to live and breed in small bands in extremely isolated locations surviving in some form even up to the present day. Wouldn’t that be something? To find a
Neanderthal and come face to face with a living descendant of the original inhabitants of Western Europe?
’
That had been the last thing that his father had said to him. Apart from ‘Goodbye’.
Breathing heavily, Gecko stood on top of the three-storey building and looked out across the rooftops of London.
The wind ruffled his hair. Down on the streets, where the ordinary people went about their business, it was warm and damp, but up here, where the wind scoured the city unobstructed, it was cool
and fresh. And he could see the sky above and all around him.
His right foot throbbed where he had landed hard from his last jump, and he could feel a burn on his back where he had forward-rolled over a gravelled tarmac roof twenty minutes before, but they
were minor distractions: badges of valour in the great game that was free-running.
He knew exactly where he was, but he still took a moment to orient himself. Making assumptions about what was on the roofs around him was a quick way to injury, or even death. He’d seen it
happen before, to friends of his. Other free-runners. Things could suddenly appear – air-conditioning vents, pipes, piles of bricks stored somewhere out of the way, even pigeon coops, rabbit
hutches or stretches of urban garden. If you jumped across a gap between two buildings expecting there to be a flat roof on which you could roll, only to find that someone had started building
themselves an attic, you could find your day seriously ruined.
His sharp eyes scanned the gap in front of him. Everything looked the same as he remembered. The gap was about three metres across – an alley between this building and the next one. He had
a feeling that the building on which he stood was an old fire station converted into an upmarket wine bar – the balustrade round the edge of the roof was ornate, sculpted from stone rather
than moulded from concrete – but he didn’t particularly care what was going on at street level. He just cared about the roofs, and the roof of the building on the other side of the gap
was about a metre lower than this one. If he rolled left when he hit it, then he’d go through a skylight and plunge inside the building; if he rolled right, then he’d impale himself on
a rusted pipe that had probably once been part of a ventilation system. In between the skylight and the pipe was a stretch of flat tarmac about a metre and a half wide and four metres long. He
could hit the roof about fifteen centimetres in and roll, to absorb some of his momentum, then come out of the roll running, and vault across the low chimney that blocked his path. He knew that on
the other side of the chimney there was a sloping section of tiles down which he could slide. At the bottom was a gutter. If he spun right and ran along the edge of the gutter, he would be in a
perfect position to leap across the next gap and grab on to the fire escape of the five-storey building next door.
He paced five steps backwards, paused, took a deep breath and ran towards the edge of the roof.
As Calum remembered his father, pictured his face and heard his voice, he felt the old, familiar feeling of helpless grief well up within him. His chest tightened, and his
breath caught in his throat. He could feel the tears behind his eyes, but he forced it all away, pushed it into the locked area at the back of his mind, which he kept for all the memories from that
time.
To distract himself, he checked the source of the photograph again, just to be sure he knew where and when it had been taken. It was one of a bunch of images uploaded to a photo-sharing site by
someone who claimed to be backpacking in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. Calum had found it by accident; or, rather, his automated internet search-bot applications had found it for him and
flagged it up for his interest.
Look at this!
the caption said.
Never seen anything like it! One of the locals LOL?
According to the date/time stamp, the image had been taken two days ago. With a couple of clicks of his trackball, Calum called up a particular and rather unusual piece of software that
automatically checked the metadata of any photograph to see if there was a GPS tag attached. Many mobile phones had GPS chips that could locate the phone to within a couple of metres, and that data
was often embedded in photographs. A window of the latitude and longitude digits appeared on the screen. He copied the figures and flicked them over to a third hanging screen – one with
Google Maps running continuously. The rotating globe in the window suddenly expanded, as if Calum was plummeting from orbit towards the surface of the Earth. Within moments he was gazing at a
picture of what looked like a dark green crinkled lettuce leaf sprinkled with mayonnaise, but which was probably ice-capped mountains seen from above. A label told him what he was looking at:
Caucasus Mountains, Georgia
.