Black Mountain

FIFTEEN

The beast threw the body to the ground, then crouched beside it and sniffed. A thousand rich scents filled its nostrils, almost overpowering its sensory system, which had been dulled by years of living and hunting in the dark. It lifted the small, broken creature, testing its weight and fragility. The limbs flopped and the head rolled on a now boneless neck. The creature held the head up and peered into the bloody face. The eyes had rolled back so only the whites showed, and the mouth hung open in a silent scream.

It reached out with one large, blunt finger, enormous against the prey’s small face, and pulled first one pupil down, then the next. It stare, transfixed, into the eyes of the kind that had supposedly driven its people deep into the mountain and imprisoned them there. It snorted. There was nothing to fear from this pitiful creature; the legends must be untrue.

The body was old and its meat would be stringy, but still ambrosia after countless years of living on blind fish, fat grub-like insects and branching lichens. It would make a fitting contribution to the feast to come.

‘Okay, what have we got?’ Matt asked.

Charles and Sarah were working on devices at opposite ends of the laboratory. Charles turned to give Matt an incredulous look, said, ‘Come back in a week,’ then immediately returned to keying in parameters for his analysis.

Matt raised his eyebrows. ‘An hour okay?’

‘Deal.’

Charles rushed over to a spinning centrifuge, switched it off so he could look at the separating residues, made a note on a pad, restarted it, then sped back to his computer. Matt grinned. He knew his friend was trying to do several weeks’ work in a few hours all by himself; he also knew he was loving every minute of it. Charles bounced over to the digital microscope that was feeding magnified images onto his screen, then quickly noted data from another computer screen about a slice of the tissue sample that had been fed into the mass spectrometer.

While Charles was a turbulent ocean of activity, Sarah, at the other end of the laboratory, was a pool of calm. She lifted her eyes from her own screen and acknowledged Matt with a slight tilt of her head.

Matt put his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and sauntered closer. ‘Can I help?’

She folded her arms, her eyes narrowing in suspicion. Then a small smile lifted the corners of her mouth. ‘I don’t know… can you help me?’ Her smile widened. ‘And how come you didn’t ask Charles if you could help him? He seems to be doing most of the work, and with a lot of unfamiliar equipment. I’m getting my software to do all mine for me.’

Matt looked briefly over his shoulder at Charles, then back to Sarah. He gave her a sheepish smile. ‘He’s more comfortable working by himself. Besides, by helping you, I’m also helping him. See, we’re all happy.’

She laughed, and pulled a disbelieving face. ‘Okay, sure. Come around here and I’ll show you what I’m doing. Wouldn’t hurt to have someone act as a sounding board.’

‘I’m your man.’

Matt moved behind her chair and looked at the split screen. Dense rows of figures rapidly scrolled up the left side, and every now and then a line of data was automatically extracted and placed in a table on the right side.

Sara pointed at the table data. ‘I’m performing a low-level analysis of the sample’s DNA, and looking at the differences and similarities between it and that of any other known hominids. At the very least, I’ll be able to tell you what it isn’t, and then maybe what it could be. The gene sampling program I’ve developed makes use of the mitochondrial DNA to track its descent back along its maternal line, and the new algorithms I’ve coded extend that lineage reach-back significantly.’

Matt bent closer to the screen but didn’t understand it any better. He could decipher hundreds of languages, some that hadn’t been spoken for millennia, but when it came to computer stuff, forget it. Nevertheless, he nodded sagely and asked the only question he could think of.

‘Yeah, Charles mentioned something about that. But, um, why not use both the maternal and paternal sources?’

Surprising him, she nodded. ‘Fair question, Matthew. Bottom line is, if you want staying power, stick with a woman.’ She kept a straight face for a few seconds, then laughed softly, showing a line of near perfect teeth. ‘Got ya, Kearns. Fact is, the paternal mitochondrial DNA is destroyed at fertilisation, so the offspring only inherits the mother’s mitochondrial DNA, creating an unbroken maternal link to the near and also long-distant past. We can easily track back hundreds of thousands of years, and now, with the new software and the computing power of my FLX, many more again. We’ve already found that a common ancestor of both modern man and the Neanderthals existed 500,000 years ago.’

Matt was impressed, and let it show.

Then he leaned a little closer to her screen, giving the impression of being more interested in it than her answer to his next question. ‘So, Sarah Marie Sommer née Peterson, how’s married life in particular and Asheville life in general?’

She snorted. ‘Married life is fantastic… the way it’s portrayed in the glossy magazines. In real life… weeell. Ever heard the saying, Marriages are made in heaven? No one ever adds the second part, which goes something like this: Marriages are made in heaven but suffered on a more temporal plane. Basically, once you come down from the heady heights of the champagne and lovemaking and have to deal with the daily routine, illness, fights and boredom… well, things aren’t quite so rosy.’ She looked at him and shrugged. ‘Karl was a fantastic guy, but one day we both woke up and looked at each other and realised we didn’t want to grow old together.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, Sarah.’ Matt put his hand on her shoulder and tried hard to look sympathetic. Inside, he felt like giving her a high-five. ‘What was he like — Karl, I mean? Is he still around?’

‘No, his family are Swiss — known as the Basel Sommers, owners of the company that makes Sportsuhr wristwatches. Karl’s being groomed to take over one day. I met him at a party in New York — he really stood out: tall, blond, broad-shouldered… and rich. You know the type. He had a real magnetism about him.’

Matt snorted. ‘Sounds like a real loser.’ He regretted the petulant response the instant it left his lips and hurried to add, ‘I mean for letting you go.’

Sarah dismissed the flattery with a slight shake of her head. ‘Yeah well, turned out we did have one thing in common — we both loved Karl Sommer.’ She half-shrugged in an I-don’t-care gesture. ‘Anyway, I’ve been single four years now and I love it. I can do what I want when I want, date who I want…’ She lifted both her eyebrows at him and smiled, then glanced at Charles.

Matt followed the glance, then leaned in close. ‘I’m pretty sure he’s already involved, and pretty committed.’

She gave him a mock look of disappointment, then turned back to her computer as it pinged softly. She sat down, started typing, then pinched her lip and frowned as she read the presented data.

Charles joined them, a sheaf of printouts in his hands. ‘Okay, I’ve gone as far as I can,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid the results are either conclusive or inconclusive, depending on your perspective.’ He flipped through the pile. ‘Okay, some background and basics first. In most mammals and every hominid except mankind, the outer layer of every cell carries glycoproteins that contain one specific family of sugar molecules called sialic acid. It’s actually one of the first tests we run to determine a human/non-human category. Surprisingly, our sample is totally without sialic acid, indicating it came from a human biology.’

Charles paused to look up at them briefly. ‘But I think we’re pretty sure it’s not from a human.’ He raised his eyebrows, then continued reading from his notes.

‘Also, I detected switched-on markers for keratin-41 — that’s the primary gene for excessive hair growth. This genotype has been switched off in mankind for a quarter of a million years. So we’ve got a human, or something like a human, but hairy like an ape. Then there’s the muscle striation residue — six times longer than human muscle fibre, but shorter than a great ape’s. So our hairy, human-like creature would be six times stronger than a man, assuming it was the same size as a man.’ He looked at Matt. ‘But we know from its footprint that it’s a lot larger, so we’re talking one powerful being.

‘There were extremely high levels of pheomelanin and almost non-existent levels of eumelanin in the sample, which basically means we’ve got a fair-skinned redhead.’ Charles looked up from his notes with a slightly bemused expression. ‘The data analysis goes on like this — one result suggesting a human-based life form, another suggesting an ape-like morphology and biology. If I were asked to summarise the findings, I’d say we have a giant redhead with a biology similar to humans and also similar to great apes, but not identical to either… something in between.’

Matt could tell Charles was both puzzled by and excited at his results.

‘Snap!’ Sarah said, clicking her fingers. ‘I’ve found the same variance — similarity conundrum. We’ve got a 98 per cent genetic match to humans, but a 99.1 per cent match to the great apes — close, but no cigar. Data on the genetic structures gives me results similar to yours, Charles — it’s in the same family, but a different species. In fact, a whole different branch of hominids, I think. If I were asked to summarise, gentlemen, I’d say you’ve got a potential whole new line, or a very old one that we don’t have any living evidence of.’

Sarah walked over to a whiteboard, picked up a marker and waggled it in her fingers as she considered where to begin. She divided the board into three sections: Prosimians; Monkeys; Apes. Under the Apes heading, she divided again, this time into four: Orangutans; Gorillas; Chimpanzees; Man. She tapped the word orangutans and turned to Charles. ‘I’m betting that’s where your gene for red hair originated, Professor Schroder.’

More arrows and names went on the board, forming a detailed family tree divergence model, showing where the different species branched off from one another. Down the side, Sarah drew a timeline. ‘Chimps and mankind separated around seven million years ago. That root species and the gorillas separated about another two to three million years before that. Now…’ She picked up a different-coloured marker and drew a line between the gorillas, orangutans and man. ‘Okay, this is what I believe we have — a whole new species that sits somewhere here on the evolutionary line. Something that probably should have died out hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago.’ She put down the pen and turned to Matt and Charles. ‘Something that modern man hasn’t seen for a very, very long time… if ever.’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘Come on, guys, you’re holding something back. What exactly are we dealing with here?’

Matt turned to Charles and grinned, then motioned for him to proceed.

Charles reached into his pocket and pulled out a small polished wooden box, which he placed on the table between Matt and Sarah. He didn’t open it.

Sarah folded her arms. ‘So what is it?’

‘My grandfather gave this to me when I was eight years old,’ Charles said. ‘It was given to him by his brother, the original Charles Schroder, who went missing in China in the mid-1930s. It was the trigger for my great-uncle’s obsession, one that perhaps killed him, and it’s been driving my own love affair ever since I received the gift.’

Charles opened the box but its contents were obscured by a black cloth.

Sarah squinted. ‘What is it?’

‘Something almost magical. Such treasures are usually sold by the Chinese farmers who find them on their land to apothecaries in the mainland cities or Hong Kong. Jù lóng de yáchî — translated as dragon’s teeth. Most often they’re ground up and used as medicine, for everything from insomnia to improved sexual performance. My great-uncle came across this in a shop in Kowloon in 1935, and sent it back to my grandfather.’

Charles unfolded the cloth to reveal a large, off-white tooth. He looked up into Sarah’s face. ‘Not a dragon’s tooth, but one belonging to Gigantopithecus, the largest hominid ever to have existed on earth. Growing to nearly ten feet in height, twelve to fifteen hundred pounds, omnivorous. These things were big, smart and aggressive — and, for a time, they were probably living side by side with Homo sapiens.’ He paused. ‘Well, maybe. The sad fact is, Homo sapiens probably killed them off. Can you imagine the look on some early Homo sapiens’ face when he came across some pissed-off creature nearly twice his height who ate meat? I’m pretty sure I’d want it out of my neighbourhood as well.’

Sarah picked up a pencil and used it to move the tooth around in the box. ‘It’s enormous. Did your great-uncle find any other evidence?’

Charles shook his head. ‘We don’t know — he disappeared. The last message he sent was from a small town called Daxin in southern China. He was heading out the next morning to see some huge rock tower riddled with limestone caves — one cave in particular, apparently — a climb of about a hundred feet straight up. My grandfather sent a party to look for him, but the villagers wouldn’t talk about him, or even take the search party up to the caves. They said the place was haunted. My grandfather thought dear old Charlie had been robbed and killed and his body hidden. But no one really knows.’

Matt carefully lifted the almost perfect, tusk-like tooth free of the box and tested its weight in the palm of his hand. He nodded to Charles. ‘I know you’re right — this has gotta be it.’

Charles gave a half-smile, took the tooth from Matt and held it up at eye level, then raised it way above his head, indicating the height of its original owner’s mouth. He couldn’t know that the previous Charles Schroder had done exactly the same thing around eighty years earlier.

‘Anyway, at the time that these rare and fantastic creatures were supposed to have died out,’ Charles said, ‘the last of the land bridges across Asia and the far north still existed. What if Gigantopithecus was forced to move somewhere without so many little hostile Homo sapiens? What if they learned to stay as far away from us as they could — in remote jungles, high on mountain peaks, in inaccessible valleys? Some humans have seen them, but generally they’re dismissed as legends. But what if they’re not? What if what we’re dealing with here is a living fossil — a living Gigantopithecus?’

Sarah was shaking her head, but her eyes were shining. ‘But how… I mean really, how? Even if we suspend our disbelief for a moment and say that maybe these creatures have been secretly living amongst us… No, sorry, not amongst us; I mean, living contemporaneously in our most remote and inaccessible places — wouldn’t we have at least seen some sign? A portion of a body that’s been discovered… a bone fragment, a rib, or a tooth that’s not fossilised?’

Charles snorted softly and carefully placed the tooth back in the box. He smiled as he looked from Matt to Sarah. ‘As rare as a black swan? There was a saying in sixteenth-century England that a good person was as impossible to find as a black swan, the idea being that swans could only be white. Well, you know what the English found when they travelled to the west coast of Australia? The swans there were all black.’ He laughed at their bemused expressions. ‘I know, I know — you’re right, Sarah, there should be some remnant of these things, and I certainly don’t have all the answers. However, I do have a theory. But consider this first: what I’m suggesting is not that fantastic when you consider the amazing things we’ve found just in the last few decades. There’s even a scientific name for these kinds of discoveries — Lazarus taxon. Go on, Google it! It covers things that we thought were extinct for millennia. And I’m not talking about insignificant little gastropods or rainforest orchids — these things can be giants.’ Charles ticked them off on his fingers. ‘In a hidden valley in Australia they found a tree called the Wollemi pine — it was supposed to have been extinct for ninety million years. Then there’s the coelacanth, the limbed fish — that little baby was meant to have been dead and gone for about 360 million years, until scientists found that the Pacific Islanders were eating it all the time — it wasn’t rare to them at all. Do you know how many missing prehistoric tribes we find every decade? Dozens. On the Brazil — Peru border, hidden under the dense tree canopy, were the Murunahua — they tried to fight off the helicopters with bows and arrows. And I’m not surprised: once modern man barged in on them, they were nearly wiped out by colds in the first two years of contact.’ He clapped his hands. ‘And I can’t begin to describe some of the strange things that are turning up now that we’re doing more deep-sea drill mining in the abyssal zones of the ocean trenches.’

Matt was nodding. He didn’t need to be convinced about biological anomalies. Beneath the Antarctic ice, he’d seen things that shouldn’t have existed anymore but were very much alive, aggressively so. He looked at Sarah. She was nodding too, but a slight frown still pulled her brows together.

‘Maybe these things just hadn’t been formally discovered or identified before,’ she said to Charles. ‘You mentioned you have a theory about why we haven’t seen any specimen fragments or more recent-term fossils of Gigantopithecus?’

Charles pursed his lips. ‘Two things — firstly, it’s the rarity, the exclusive rarity.’ He pinched his bottom lip, as though looking for a place to start his explanation. ‘They remain hidden out in the open for long — so it was the caves that got me thinking. My great-uncle disappeared on a caving expedition, presumably looking for the source of this fossil.’ He gestured to the tooth. ‘We find new caves all the time, and often we also find weird things living within them. The deep darkness hides a lot of prehistory’s secrets.’

‘Too right,’ Matt said, then looked embarrassed that he’d spoken the thought aloud. ‘Sorry, carry on.’

‘Secondly: intelligence,’ Charles said. ‘If we combine what we know about the Gigantopithecus fossils being found in caves and what we’ve recently been discovering about the ways proto-Neanderthals used to bury their dead deep in caves — well, we now believe, in fact, that they used to hide them — so what if these giant hominids had similar ceremonies? They were rare to begin with, but if they also bury their dead deep in the earth, or even, as with certain tribes, eat their dead, then we’ve been lucky to find any fossil evidence at all.’

He looked at Matt’s and Sarah’s expressions and grimaced slightly. ‘Yeah, I know, it’s a stretch. These things are more likely to be about as smart as gorillas — prehistory’s answer to the gentle giant. They were probably wiped out by more modern and aggressive hominids — namely, us.’

Sarah didn’t answer. Instead, she stared at the tooth in the box and a slow smile started to spread across her face. ‘Okay, so we think we know what it could be, but we’re a long way from being able to convince anyone else,’ she said. ‘But there is one way we can be sure.’

She walked quickly to the rear of the laboratory and searched through a few bench drawers, then returned with something that looked a little like an electric toothbrush without the bristles. She placed it on the table so its shining tip was pointing at the box with the tooth in it. It was a bone drill and Matt knew exactly what she wanted to do with it — make a hole in the tooth. The rare fossil that Charles had inherited from his grandfather’s dead brother and treasured since he was eight; the tooth that had been the trigger for Charles’s entire career.

Ouch, he mouthed, and looked at his friend.

‘What do you have in mind?’ asked Charles.

He didn’t go bananas, Matt thought. That’s got to be a good thing.

Sarah put her slim fingers on each side of the small box. ‘Teeth don’t denature as fast as normal bones do — the enamel and dentin are extremely resilient to penetration of groundwater and therefore mineralisation. We’ve extracted viable DNA from the dried pulp of a 130,000-year-old mastodon tooth. We’ve got the DNA technology right here to fill in any missing base pair blanks — I can match the tooth and the organic sample’s DNA in a few hours. Irrefutable proof. You just say the word.’

Charles pinched his lower lip again, thinking. Then he smiled. ‘Word.’

The old man kneeled in a clearing on the outskirts of town. Before him loomed the Black Mountain, its peak shrouded by freezing cloud. His eyes moved along the horizon, tracing the rise and fall of the other dark peaks, before he bent to light the small fire he’d built from sticks collected nearby. Once the fire had taken, he opened a sack and drew out a handful of feathers, nettles and powder. He sprinkled them onto the flames, each causing the tongues of fire to burn a different hue. Lastly, he placed a single bone across the burning twigs. He swore softly and quickly changed its position so the broken tip pointed at the mountain peaks.

The old man got slowly to his feet and chanted in a strong voice over the flames, pointing with a flat hand to each of the peaks, finishing with the tallest — the Dome. He threw another handful of powder at its hidden summit, then stood silently for a moment.

When he was done, he hoisted the bag onto his shoulder and set off for his next destination. There were more fires to be lit before the spirit barrier might have a chance of holding and he could feel the town was secure.

As he walked, he heard a deep whooping noise far off in the distance.