The Chimera Secret

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.’

‘What? Lopez asked.

‘They were tiny,’ Professor Middleton said. ‘A fully grown adult male might only reach three feet tall. It’s the result of a process called dwarfism, when a species finds itself on a small island or in an environment with limited resources. Evolution through natural selection favors smaller species with smaller demands on the limited environment. Sophisticated stone implements of a size considered appropriate to the three-foot-tall humans were widely present in the cave. The implements were at horizons from ninety-five to thirteen thousand years ago and were found in the same stratigraphic layer as an elephant of the extinct genus Stegodon, also a dwarf species, which was widespread throughout Asia during the period and presumably the prey. They also shared the island with giant rats and Komodo dragons.’

‘So?’ Ethan asked.

‘They didn’t die out until just thirteen thousand years ago,’ Jarvis explained. ‘Local geology suggests that a volcanic eruption on Flores approximately twelve thousand years ago was responsible for the demise of Homo floresiensis, along with other local fauna, including the elephant Stegodon. But the Nage people of Flores still speak of the Ebu Gogo people: small, hairy, language-poor cave dwellers on the scale of this species.’

‘They’re still alive?’ Lopez asked in amazement.

‘It’s entirely possible,’ Middleton said, ‘that pockets of this species could have survived until this day. Imagine, an entirely different species of human walking our planet. The dwarfism that has caused their diminutive size seems to have had little impact on their technological achievements when compared to our own ancestors of equivalent vintage.’

‘What have they got to do with a sasquatch though?’ Lopez asked. ‘They’re supposed to be huge.’

Middleton simply gestured again to the footprint.

‘The opposite of dwarfism is giganticism,’ he explained. ‘Put simply, if a species is placed into either a resource-rich environment, or one where there are predators big enough to force an evolutionary advantage in being large, then almost any species can grow to enormous proportions.’

‘Kind of like the dinosaurs,’ Ethan suggested.

‘Exactly like the dinosaurs,’ Middleton agreed. ‘Even before they ruled the earth, the atmosphere of our planet was far richer in oxygen than today, resulting in species that still exist but were far larger in the past. There were centipedes a hundred times larger than today and dragonflies with wingspans two yards across.’

Ethan had a mental image of a dragonfly with the wingspan of an eagle, then quickly exterminated it from his thoughts with a shiver.

Jarvis’s cellphone trilled in his pocket. He answered it, asked a couple of brief questions and then shut the line off and looked at Ethan. ‘There’s been a development.’

‘What?’

‘They’ve found the remains of park ranger Gavin Coltz,’ Jarvis said sternly. ‘Whatever killed him, it sure as hell wasn’t a man.’