Black Mountain

THIRTEEN

Chief Logan sat at his desk scrolling through the Medical Examiner’s report on the contents of the lion’s digestive tract. He was relieved that he didn’t have to make a call to Clark and Helen Wilson to tell them that their little girl had been taken by a lion — a freakin’ lion in Asheville, for Chrissakes! But he couldn’t shake the morbid feeling that something else was out there. There’d just been too many weird goings-on lately.

He really wanted to believe that Emma Wilson was still alive, that she’d wandered off after some late-season deer maybe, and then got lost in the dark. That she was huddled in a sheltered hollow somewhere below the snow line. The reality was, he’d have been satisfied even if they found her small body curled up and frozen solid, proof that she’d gone to sleep in the cold and never woken up. A horrible thought, given the pain her parents would feel, but still better than the crazy alternative that was floating around in his mind.

Logan lifted the cover of a folder on his desk and slid out the photos from Amanda Jordan’s camera. The hulking shape in the falling snow caused a knotted feeling of disquiet in his gut. Yep, finding little Emma frozen, but untouched, would not be the worst thing that could happen, he thought again as he closed the folder.

The chief sipped his coffee, barely tasting the bitter liquid as his mind continued to work. He had too many questions, and any answers he received only led to more questions. In a month, the snow would start to fall in earnest, and then the winter folk would arrive for skiing, schnapps and fistfights with the locals. He’d prefer to keep everyone off the mountain until he knew exactly what was going on, but that wouldn’t win him any friends in the local business community. Better not take another call from the mayor just yet, he thought glumly, pushing the folder to the back of his desk. He slumped a little lower in his chair. Truth was, he had no idea what to do next.

The phone beeped, and he frowned at it for a few seconds before picking it up. ‘Shelley, I thought I said —’ He stopped as he processed her reply: an urgent call from the field. Right now, he needed any information he could get. He sat forward. ‘Patch it.’

Logan listened solemnly, his face seeming to age on the spot. ‘Good god,’ he whispered. ‘Time of death?’ His voice rose. ‘Just freakin’ make a guess then.’ He closed his eyes. ‘Uh-huh, that’s probably after the lion was already dead. Okay, tell Ted Brandon to get his boys out there. I’ll be on my way in another twenty minutes.’

Logan hung up and sat in silence, wishing he had any other job besides the one he held. The phone beeped again and he lifted the handset slowly to his ear.

‘Chief Logan?’

Logan was relieved to hear the young professor’s voice; he didn’t feel ready for anything else from the field right now. ‘Professor Kearns, what can I do for you? I’m a little busy right now.’

‘Chief, the Wilson place — we were just out there and —’

Logan felt like being angry with someone; Kearns would do. He cut the man off. ‘What the fuck were you doing out there?’

‘We found something.’

The angry curl of Logan’s lips flattened as he waited for the university professor to continue.

‘Some tracks,’ Kearns added.

‘We know the lion was there, Professor Kearns.’

‘No, I mean yes… we know the lion was there, but these were a different type of print, something… strange. You remember the photographs of the shape in the snow up on Black Mountain? Well, we got a connection.’

Logan pulled the folder back towards him and flicked it open. He tapped the hulking shape with one large finger, thinking. He felt a leaden ball starting to grow in his gut.

‘You there, Chief?’ Logan grunted and Matt Kearns continued. ‘The friend I mentioned, Charles Schroder, he specialises in these types of occurrences. He thinks we might have something up here that we need to be… cautious with.’

‘Cautious? What does that mean — it’s dangerous?’

‘Maybe… probably.’

Logan thought furiously, weighing up what he knew against what he didn’t. The imbalance was too great not to use everything he had at his disposal.

‘Professor Kearns, there’s been an attack and a disappearance out at the Hunter place. Might be something else… strange. I can pick you up out front in ten minutes if you feel like tagging along.’

Matt felt a sense of déjà vu as he and Charles watched the police forensics team pick over the Hunter place for clues. Just like Emma Wilson, Kathleen Hunter had disappeared. But unlike the Wilson case, which had offered up very little in the way of evidence for the police, this time there were traces of a struggle. It was unlikely that Kathleen Hunter, a woman in her seventies, could have survived that much blood loss.

Matt put a hand over his nose and mouth to try to mask the thick, coppery scent lingering in the air. He’d never been to a crime scene before, and at first he’d tried not to react to the ghastly tableau, detaching himself from its violence as if it were simply a scene from one of the hundred horror movies he’d watched. But the more he became immersed in the detail, the more nauseated he felt. Matt couldn’t help empathising with the woman, alone and frightened in the night. He’d known terror himself, had seen people he loved brutally killed by a creature that had come out of the stygian deep. It tormented his dreams to this day.

Charles nudged him to get his attention as two police officers carried a stretcher towards their truck. As they came closer, Matt put his hand up to stop them. He lifted the blanket and saw the battered body of an enormous dog. Its eyes had rolled back into its head, and the neck looked soft and boneless beneath the fur. Matt made a sound of regret.

Charles made to lay his hand on the dog’s muzzle, but one of the officers yelled a sharp rebuke almost directly into his ear. Matt saw his friend flinch, but to his credit he didn’t step back.

Matt held up his hand again, this time in a placating gesture. ‘It’s okay, officers, we’re working with Chief Logan — we’re consultants.’ He yelled over the men’s heads, ‘Okay, Chief?’

Logan looked around and seemed to sum up the situation immediately. ‘Give ’em what they need, boys,’ he yelled back, then went back to talking to Ted Brandon.

Charles lifted his hand to the dog again and ran his fingers deftly from its head down its back and along its limbs, feeling the bone breaks and joint separations and inspecting the lacerations. At the flanks, he worked his hand slowly back up the body, returning eventually to the head. He examined the snout, then lifted the dog’s lips. He quickly brought his face closer, then fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a sample tube and a set of surgical tweezers.

‘Hold this,’ he said to Matt, and held out the small container without turning, his eyes riveted on whatever he’d found in the dog’s mouth. He pulled back the heavy lip and used the tweezers to tug something from between the teeth. He exhaled slowly and turned to Matt, his eyes round with excitement. ‘Look… and some of the dermis is still attached.’

The tweezers held a small tuft of reddish-brown hair, coarse and bloody. Matt could see the small plug of glistening flesh that bound it together.

He uncapped the vial and Charles carefully dropped the sample in. He pocketed the tweezers, then took the tube from Matt’s hand and capped it. He held it up so they could both examine its contents. The hair was unbelievably thick, and oily looking. Charles shook the vial, uncapped it again and waved it under his nose. He nodded, then extended it for Matt to smell.

Matt recoiled from the rank odour. ‘Phew, what is that?’

Charles didn’t answer as he screwed the plastic cap on tightly. ‘We need a lab, pronto, before this degrades.’

‘Finished?’ one of officers asked, looking bored.

Matt stepped closer to the dog on the stretcher and placed his hand on its huge shoulder, stroking the fur. ‘Musta been some fight. Where are you taking it?’

The officer covered the dog’s head with the blanket again, to keep away an inquisitive fly. ‘Chief wants an autopsy.’ He nodded to his partner, then motioned with his head to the truck.

Matt yelled after them, ‘Hey, any chance of a lift to the university?’

The officers dropped Matt and Charles a good mile from the university. Neither complained, however, as the ride had taken place in an uncomfortable silence, Matt’s occasional questions eliciting little more than grunts from the two officers. Matt was also glad of the fresh air; the same revolting smell he’d sniffed in the vial emanated from the dog on the stretcher.

The two men walked in silence along the university drive. Matt had given up asking Charles about the sample; the most his friend would give him was, ‘Not yet.’ The late season sunshine was pleasant on Matt’s shoulders, and coaxed a low zumming from crickets and cicadas in the long grasses beside the road. Matt let his mind wander across the strange events of the last few days. He was worried that he might have got himself and Charles into something a lot more complex and dangerous than he’d originally expected. His stomach tightened.

Charles’s quiet voice broke his reverie. ‘Ten o’clock.’

‘Huh?’ Matt saw that although Charles was facing forward, his eyes were focused on the field to their left.

‘Don’t look,’ Charles said softly, but of course Matt did.

An old man in an oversized blue chambray shirt stood like a withered fence post amongst the long grass. Even from this distance Matt could see that his rheumy eyes were fixed intently on him and Charles. After they’d passed, Matt could still feel the scrutiny like a laser on the back of his neck. He couldn’t resist looking back, but the field was empty. He saw that Charles was looking into the deserted field too.

‘Wonder what that was about?’ Charles said.

Matt shrugged. ‘Forget about it. C’mon.’ But he couldn’t forget about it. He’d felt as if the old man’s stare had held recognition and a hint of… suspicion.

Matt looked around the campus to get his bearings. He felt better being back at the university. ‘I figure we need a high-power microscope, access to a computer and the internet, and possibly a fully functioning biology lab. Oh yeah, and an assistant or two.’

Charles looked surprised. ‘I’m impressed, you must really have some pull here.’

Matt sucked in a cheek and shook his head. ‘Unfortunately, not. I said we needed that stuff; I didn’t say we’d get it. Still, I expect to be on staff here soon so that’s got to count for something. Let’s try the nice approach first, and if that fails I’ll invoke the name of the terrifying Chief Logan.’

Charles grinned. ‘Sounds like a plan.’

Matt nodded towards an enormous mustard-yellow building on the other side of the quadrangle that towered four storeys above its neighbours either side. ‘Zeis Hall.’

‘Wow, nice facilities. This is no backwoods place of learning, is it?’ Charles seemed amazed at the amount of infrastructure for a relatively small town.

‘Nice facilities indeed — these guys were teaching molecular biology and robotics fifteen years ago. They’ll have what we need, we’ve just got to get access to it. Come on.’

They moved quickly down a corridor with so highly a polished floor that they experienced the odd sensation of walking on their own reflections. The rooms on either side held banks of computer monitors, electronics equipment, whiteboards sporting literary quotations.

Charles jerked to a stop as if reaching the end of a leash. ‘Wow! I mean really, wow!’

‘What is it?’ Matt backed up.

Charles stepped into the unoccupied room. ‘What it is, Professor Matthew Kearns, is an FLX genome sequencer — top of the line, one billion runs with a gene-read length of 1000 base pairs per run. Hell, I’ve been trying to get one of these babies at Harvard for two years. You know, you could decode an entire E. coli bacterium’s DNA in a single day with this.’

Matt pulled a face. ‘Holy shit — E. coli? Did anyone else just get a hot flush? Let’s go.’ He turned to leave.

Charles grabbed at his arm. ‘No, really, it’s important. We can use it to map our sample’s DNA back along its maternal line to analyse its comparative evolution — see what it is, and where it came from.’

Matt looked from the machine to his friend’s serious face, then nodded. He turned to check the name on the room’s door — Professor S. Sommer. ‘This must be the guy we need to talk to.’

The next room was a large biology lab, filled with long benches, each with a heating element and waste sink every six feet. Peering through the glass of the door, Matt could see the room was ringed by shelves holding all manner of beakers and tubes, and, most importantly, computers that were double-cabled into walls — power and internet access. A woman was typing at one of the computers, her back to them. At the front of the room, writing on a whiteboard, was a tall man with longish silver hair. With his perfectly trimmed beard, half-glasses, neat jacket and corduroy vest, he looked like a Central Casting version of a professor.

‘Great, and Dumbledore’s home as well,’ Matt whispered to Charles. He pushed open the door and cleared his throat. ‘Professor Sommer, I presume?’

The man turned and looked at them over the top of his glasses, then, without a word, let his eyes slide slowly past them to the rear of the room. Matt followed his gaze to where the woman who’d been working on the computer now sat with her arms folded, watching him.

‘For a scientist, you make a lot of assumptions, Matthew Kearns,’ she said. ‘But then again, you always did.’ She started to thread her way through the tables towards them, pulling off a pair of small glasses as she came, a half-smile at the corner of her mouth. ‘I heard you were in town… and you might be joining us.’

Matt blinked and frowned for a moment, before recognition broke through his confusion. ‘What… Sarah Peterson? You’re Professor Sommer?’

‘Professor Sarah Sommer — Sommer’s my married name. And yes, I run the biology departments at AU, all three of them. This is my assistant, Roger Burrows.’

Matt turned back to the man, ready to apologise, but Burrows gave him an uninterested glance and went back to writing on the board.

‘And you are…?’ Sarah held out her hand to Charles.

Charles shot his hand out in response. ‘Excuse him; he’s not used to social contact. Professor Charles Schroder, Anthropology, Harvard. A pleasure to meet you, Professor Sommer.’

‘Sarah, please, and likewise.’ She tilted her head. ‘Tell me, you’re not the Professor Charles Schroder who wrote the paper on comparative analysis of early hominids using DNA markers, are you?’

Matt snorted.

Charles shrugged and stood a little taller. ‘Yes, yes, I am.’

Sarah smiled at him. ‘That analysis was brilliant work.’

Charles nodded a little too deeply, turning it into a half-bow. Matt groaned.

‘Follow me,’ Sarah said, motioning to the door. She started towards it, Charles in tow. He looked back over his shoulder at Matt and raised an eyebrow. Matt exhaled slowly and followed. As he left the room, he saw Roger Burrows looking at him over the top of his glasses. This time he was smiling.

Matt felt nervous; she made him nervous. He hadn’t seen her since his university days, and here he was trying to impress her all over again. He cleared his throat.

‘We believe what we have here is unique: a tissue sample of an extremely rare creature. We need to examine it at both cellular and genetic level to determine if we’re right. If we are, this could be the biggest news since… I don’t know, since Noah’s Ark.’

He groaned inwardly as the words came out of his mouth. They sounded bombastic even to his own ears, and he knew he was recklessly inflating something Charles had only hinted at.

Sarah folded her arms, one eyebrow raised slightly. ‘Noah’s Ark, you say?’

Charles cut in before Matt could respond. ‘We know that’s a little melodramatic. But we do have some indeterminate biological material, which leads us to suspect there may be some form of new, or very old, anthropoid species on the Black Mountain. We’d like to do some lower-level analysis on the sample just to see if we can identify it according to any of the known taxonomic branches.’

Matt got the drift: lower the expectations; go easy on the details for the moment. He put on his most businesslike expression. ‘Charles is right. It might be nothing more than an escaped chimpanzee, or some sort of weird-looking ground squirrel. But we promised the police chief we’d do our best to identify it.’

Sarah’s eyebrow went up another notch. ‘Uh-huh… and is this ground squirrel responsible for the recent thefts of cows and domestic pets, or potentially involved in the attacks on the farms recently?’

‘There’s also a lion loose from the circus,’ Matt spluttered. ‘That’s probably resp—’

Sarah leaned forward. ‘Lion’s dead — the police shot it.’

Matt slowly turned to Charles. Charles just shrugged and pointed to him with a flat, open hand — over to you, you’re doin’ great was the implication. Matt laughed. He shut his eyes for a moment, rubbed them with a thumb and finger, then leaned towards Sarah.

‘Oookay, we don’t really believe it’s a squirrel or fugitive chimp. We think there may be some form of early hominid running around on the mountain, and we’d like to try to determine if it’s one we know of or something completely new.’

‘Go on.’

Matt stared at her for several seconds, torn between telling her everything and wanting to hold back on some of their wilder suspicions until they could prove or disprove them.

Sarah stared back levelly, and the corner of her mouth turned up slightly. ‘Listen up, the pair of you. I’ve lived in this town for most of my life. I love the place, and anything that threatens it or its folk gets my full attention. And one more thing before you start bullshitting: I’m quite a well-respected professor of biology who’s pretty highly regarded in the international arena on matters of cellular biology, environmental gene mutations and a dozen other organic micro-matter subjects. Gentlemen, you have two choices. One: you can try and snow me, and you’ll be out that door in seconds. Or two: tell me everything, and I may be able to help.’ She turned from one to the other, looking them each in the eye. ‘Your call, boys.’

Matt looked again at Charles, who nodded slowly. ‘We need her,’ he said. ‘Her and her sequencer.’

Matt compressed his lips, then turned to Sarah. ‘Look, there’ve been stories about something in these mountains for hundreds if not thousands of years. Not just in these mountains, but all over the world.’ He sucked in a breath and let it out slowly, preparing for her ridicule. ‘We think we may have a tissue fragment from a mega-hominid… a living mega-hominid.’ He gritted his teeth, waiting for the mocking laughter.

Instead, she slid her chair across the floor to her computer and began to type. When she’d found what she was looking for, she half-turned the screen for Matt and Charles to see. ‘As I said, I’ve lived here for a long time, and I know every creature in these parts, big and small. But in the last few weeks… well, I’ve begun to suspect that there’s something else out there. Something that doesn’t fit.’ She started typing again. ‘For several years now, we’ve had microphones placed around the slopes to collect ornithological data for a number of the local societies. But recently we’ve picked up something else.’

She hit a key and adjusted the volume. The booming whoops and grunts were eerie in the small room.

Charles sat forward, his mouth open. When it stopped, he leaped out of his chair. ‘Play it again.’

She hit the replay, and folded her arms. ‘I’ve never heard anything like it… except it reminds me of something at the same time. I just can’t place it.’

Charles turned the computer around, then paused. ‘May I?’ He didn’t wait for a response, just started typing furiously. ‘Listen.’ From the computer came a series of hoots, whoops, snorts and grunts.

‘You see, you need a certain shaped larynx without vocal cords to create those sounds,’ he said to Sarah. ‘Also a heavy jaw, and a deep barrel-chest.’ He played the sounds again and swung the screen around for Matt to see. ‘God bless you, Dian Fossey.’

On the screen was an image of a black mountain gorilla. Its dark, human-like eyes stared out from under a rubber-thick brow ridge.

Sarah’s frown deepened. ‘You think it’s a gorilla up there?’

Charles smiled and shook his head slowly. ‘No, and not by a million years of evolution. But if it is what I think it is, an escaped lion would have been a lot simpler to deal with… and to explain.’