The Cryptids Read online

  THE CRYPTIDS

  ELANA GOMEL

  Copyright © 2019 by Elana Gomel

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means without the author’s written consent, except for the purposes of review

  Cover Design © 2019 by Carlos Villa

  https://www.artstation.com/villas7

  ISBN-13: 978-1-947522-20-6

  ISBN-10: 1-947522-20-5

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s fertile imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  READ UNTIL YOU BLEED!

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This novel has been long time in the making; and of everything I have written, it is probably my favorite. No writer can properly acknowledge all the many influences that go into the finished product and all the many people who have made it possible. My idea of bio-horror has been shaped by classics like H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine and William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land and also by evolutionary scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Ernst Mayr. But as important as books are, people are more important. My thanks go to my sons Ariel and Eliran, my many Californian friends, and my publisher Pete Kahle for making it possible. And of course, the most profound debt of gratitude is to my husband Jim Martin for exploring the wilderness of dreams together.

  PREVIOUS PUBLICATIONS

  Novels

  A Tale of Three Cities

  The Hungry Ones

  Novellas

  Dreaming the Dark

  The Checkpoint

  Worst of Times

  Collections

  Unhome

  Selected Short Stories

  “In the Moment”, New Horizons, 2010 (second place in the 2009 Short Story Competition of the British Fantasy Society)

  “Going East”, People of the Book: A Decade of JewishScienceFiction and Fantasy (Prime Books, 2010)

  “The Farm”. Apex Book of World SF, Volume 4

  “Dead Ice”. Hypnos. April 2017

  “Antlions”. Alien Dimensions, Issue 12 (2017)

  “Little Sister”. Matador Review, January 1 2018

  “The Other Iseult”. Unfading Daydream, Issue 4 (April 2018)

  “Stella Maris”. Nightscript IV (October 2018).

  “The Sea of Salt”. Dies Infaustus. A Murder of Storytellers (2018)

  “Death in Jerusalem”. Zion’s Fiction (2018).

  “Dreaming of Ravens”. Transcendent (2018).

  “The Prison-House of Language”. Apex Magazine, March 2019

  Non-Fiction

  Bloodscripts: Writing the Violent Subject

  The Pilgrim Soul: Being Russian in Israel

  Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination

  Narrative Space and Time: Representing

  Impossible Topologies in Literature

  Science Fiction, Alien Encounters, and the Ethics

  of Posthumanism: Beyond the Golden Rule

  PESCADERO BEACH

  In the dawn light the beach looked like an alien terrain: whorls and spirals of corrugated sand pierced by bones of driftwood. The gunmetal surface of tidal pools was wrinkled by the brisk wind.

  Maureen scrambled down the eroded slope. He followed slowly, hanging back, seeing her diminishing figure as if through an inverted telescope.

  "Look!" she exclaimed, pointing.

  An off-shore rock came alive. A flock of gulls, cormorants, sandpipers, and pelicans rose into the pale air, obscuring the pewter-colored sun. Shadows of their wings dappled the wet sand.

  He pulled out his phone and it dropped from his shaking fingers into the slimy weeds at his feet. He had a moment of pure terror. After all these months of trial-and-error to be thwarted by a slippery phone-case! He groped in the weeds and breathed out his accumulated tension when his fingers closed around the plastic rectangle.

  A wave of sharp acrid stench rolled over them, over-powering the briny smell of the ocean.

  PART 1

  THE GOLDEN STATE

  CHAPTER 1

  She was staying in a wooden chalet incongruously perched above the lion-colored stubbly hills. There were other travelers in the chalet, all strangers, except for a girl who looked like Julie. There was also a child who hid in dark corners.

  A man in a bespoke suit came in, carrying a folder. His face was a blank expanse of sallow skin without a single feature. Swimming under its surface like a darting shadow was another face: thin and feathery, with a predatory beak and side-facing round eyes.

  The man gave each traveler a voucher with a date on it.

  “This is a free voucher for your flight back home,” the man said. “The date is the date of your death".

  Sharon Manley woke up, her heart hammering. She pulled the Petersens’ thick quilt over her head, curling up into the warmth. Mark’s absence lay like an icy hollow under her breastbone.

  She had recognized the eyes and the beak. Argentavis magnificens, the giant teratorn, an extinct Miocene predatory bird with the wingspan of 26 feet.

  She flashed back to the last night’s conversation at the dinner table. Carl and Rhoda were finishing their wine. Carl had his iPad out and was swiping it in search of postprandial news while Rhoda was watching Sharon with a fretful expression on her lined face.

  “How did it go today?” Rhoda asked.

  “Just look at this nonsense!” Carl exclaimed.

  Sharon pretended she did not hear Rhoda’s question. She still cringed, remembering the glassy look in the chairman's eyes as he had pushed her resume across the table. They did not need adjunct professors for the next academic year, the biology department was downsizing, budget cuts, and Ms. Manley was of course aware…

  Dr. Manley, actually, but at this point his voice had faded into a drone and all she wanted was to be out of that stuffy little office in that third-rate community college. She got up rudely and walked out. Outside the familiar smell of academic life hit her like cigarette smoke tickling the nostrils of a recent quitter: a heady aroma composed of disinfectant, students’ sweaty bodies, and stink of caged lab animals. She caught the hem of her new skirt in the door and tugged. The skirt slid out with a ripping sound and she spat out “Kurwa!” She had no idea what it meant. It was Mark’s word.

  A male student turned around and stared at her tight black top. She could see his mind shifting through his stock of clichés, trying to place her: too old for a student, too tarted-up for a professor, too exotic for a faculty wife…She glowered at him and the student hurried away.

  She turned to Carl with a forced smile.

  “What is it, Carl?”

  He swiveled his iPad around, showing her the front page of the online edition of the San Jose Mercury News. All she could see was an editorial on the latest proposition to increase property taxes.

  “I agree they are already high but…”

  “Not that!” Carl barked and stabbed at a smaller headline.

  Sighting of a giant eagle on Pescadero Beach.

  She rolled her eyes. A Californian eagle was a big bird but giant?

  “Four times as big as a Californian eagle,” Carl read out as if responding to her thought. “Who comes up with this stuff?”

  Sharon’s lethargy dissipated:

  "A thunderbird sighting?"

  "A thunderbird?" Carl Petersen repeated, frowning. "No, they say it was an eagle. What's a thunderbird?"

  Rhoda leaned over his shoulder.

  "Oh no!" she exclaimed. "It's that man whose wife disappeared. Now he claims to have seen a giant bird too?"

  Carl peered at the screen.

  "He s
ays his wife was taken by a giant bird," he chuckled. "The Merc is in the toilet if they need this kind of clickbait. It used to be a real newspaper, now it’s an online rag.”

  She had checked the story afterwards when the Petersens retired and she was free to escape into the guest quarters. She had a hot bath but even the smell of lavender and the green-and-gold Californian twilight failed to salve the sting of yet another failure. Sharon knew herself all too well: left alone, her mind would go over her accumulated defeats, worrying at them like a dog with a bone. So as a diversion she logged onto the San Jose Mercury website and read the description of the incident. She was not much wiser afterwards. Yes, the man in question had probably been drunk or delusional. Yes, he had probably seen a Californian golden eagle. Yes, his wife…well, whatever had happened to her, she had not been not carried away by an eagle who would be hard pressed to lift even a small dog, let alone a person.

  On the other hand…

  The witness’ name was Lester Choy, a resident of Mountain View. He claimed to have encountered a giant bird of an unknown species early on the morning of July 21 at Pescadero Beach, about forty miles south of San Francisco. Pescadero State Beach is a popular hiking and recreational destination but the day in question being Tuesday and the hour ungodly 5.30 AM, there had been no other witnesses. It was not clear what Mr. Choy and his wife had been doing on the beach so early in the morning. The article said that Mrs. Maureen Choy had been declared missing and a search for her was underway.

  "The bird had the wingspan of about 25 feet or seven and a half meters," Mr. Choy had said. "In the general shape it resembled a condor, but its beak was long, powerful and hooked, like an eagle's beak, not stubby like a condor's. Its head was not bald either and there was no flap of skin above its eyes. It had very powerful long legs with giant grasping talons, covered in a sort of down. It was dark-colored, maybe black or even navy. Its eyes were flashing red. It was a real predator."

  Teratorns were relatives of condors but their beaks resembled those of eagles, indicating an actively predatory rather than scavenging lifestyle. And yes, a teratorn could have carried away a human being. There were precedents: in Switzerland where an eight-year-old girl was reportedly snatched away by something that looked like an eagle on steroids and in 1977 in Lawndale, Illinois, where a hefty ten-year-old was dragged by a huge bird across his backyard.

  Teratorns had been extinct for over 5 million years.

  Sharon had a perfect answer to this but in a strange house in this alien country she was beginning to doubt it made sense. Or that it was important. She was thirty-four. Her career was going nowhere. The most important relationship of her life was over.

  She still had dreams, though, and they were becoming increasingly vivid as her life was bleeding away. Lying in bed, she clung to the dissipating remnant of the thunderbird dream. Even nightmares were preferable to emptiness.

  CHAPTER 2

  The woman slowed down on the uphill slope, lifting her face toward the redwood boughs tracing intricate hieroglyphs in the cloudless sky. She was a good runner, had done the Seattle marathon several times, but age was beginning to tell. She whistled and her dog, a frisky black Lab, came out of the manzanita bushes, his tail wagging energetically. She patted his head and drew air into her lungs, ready for another spurt, when the dog suddenly froze, his lips pulling back from his teeth, a growl beginning deep in his throat.

  “Come on, Buddy, it’s just a deer!” she called out impatiently.

  The growl rose a fever pitch and the Lab dove into a dense patch of undergrowth. The crunch of breaking wood was as loud as a shot. The woman yelled but the dog did not reappear. She started after him but stopped when she saw the scarlet gleam of poison oak. Just perfect! Now Buddy would need a bath; her afternoon exercise was ruined; Steve had messaged that he would be home late; and…

  The scarlet gleam was wet. She stared, unwilling to let her brain acknowledge what her eyes were seeing. There was no sound from the undergrowth. The silence was as absolute as it always was in the redwoods, wrapping her up in layers of what used to be peace but was now paralysis.

  There were rumors of mountain lions…

  She backed off, slipped on dry bark and fell, raising a cloud of leaves and needles. The manzanita bushes whipped around as something pushed through.

  Sharon’s diary was pristinely blank for the week ahead: no more job interviews. There were two community colleges that had not yet responded to her resume, and she milked the delay of rejection for every drop of hope. But she had a job of sorts, gotten through Rhoda’s extensive network of friends and relatives. A techie who lived in a multi-million house in the Santa Cruz Mountains amused himself by keeping a collection of rare amphibians and reptiles at home. He needed somebody to baby-sit his pets. He had instantly taken to Sharon when she had correctly identified his current favorite as a Hochstetter frog from New Zealand. Like all of Frank’s animals, Hochstetter frogs were a protected species and forbidden to import.

  Sharon needed the money but just the drive up the mountain to Frank’s house was enough of a reward for helping him break the law. Once she cleared Alice’s Restaurant where aged bikers shyly ogled her through their bulging helmets, she was alone on the mountain road dappled with gold and green and shaded by the feathery branches of redwoods and Douglas firs. Occasionally the bright strawberry-colored trunk of a madrone would flash by like a ruby set in jade. And even on a summer day there were thick undulating bands of fog lying across the tarmac, ghosts of twilight unafraid of the mild sun of Northern California.

  She passed her favorite curve where the woods fell away on both sides and revealed the bark-littered slopes of ocher and pink dotted with cushions of emerald moss. And then she pulled into the driveway of Frank’s rustic cabin on steroids.

  The frogs were ailing. The big male (about 5 centimeters long, huge by the standards of his species, and christened John Henry) seemed sluggish as he emitted a thin squeak perched on Sharon’s finger. New Zealand frogs don’t croak but it seemed to her he was deliberately complaining.

  “I know how you feel,” she said.

  By the time Frank got home, she had fed John Henry and his mates, cleaned their enclosure and removed the rose-colored Madagascar chameleon named Pinky from the mantelshelf where he liked to imitate an ornament. Frank muttered a greeting, which was the pinnacle of his social skills. He could, however, talk for hours, animatedly and fluently, about frogs, rare plants, and deep learning software. Sharon considered him the closest thing to a friend she had in California. The fact that he had an autism spectrum condition and could never tell what she was thinking or feeling was a huge relief. Nowadays she did not want anybody peering into the curdled jumble of her emotions.

  “Hey, Frank,” she asked, “did you see that thing in the San Jose rag about a replay of the Birds in Pescadero?”

  He stared at her blankly and she had to explain. It turned out that he had heard of the case but did not know Hitchcock’s movie.

  “What do you think happened?” she asked. “Was the guy drunk?”

  “I don’t know,” he shrugged. “It certainly sounds like he was. The largest bird here is the Californian condor and it’s very rare, even though a couple has been observed in Big Sur, and in any case, its wingspan is only…”

  “9 feet, I know,” Sharon said impatiently. “So it’s hard to imagine somebody claiming a wingspan three times that unless he was under the influence”.

  “Especially Les Choy,” said Frank.

  “You know him?”

  “Met him a couple of times.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He has a start-up.”

  “Could you give me his number?”

  “Sure.”

  It was stupid, she told herself. She was done with cryptozoology. It had come between her and Mark even before Julie. It had destroyed her career.

  No, she was not going to call him.

  Mark Kaminski was driving on M1 toward Heath
row. Clammy fog fastened upon his windshield like a clinging lover. Swept aside by the wipers, it always came back, embracing the car with its tenuous arms.

  His cellphone played the opening bars of “Carmina Burana”. He pressed the Reject button and turned on the radio. BBC1 news bulletin was on but he caught only the tail end: something about long queues at Heathrow. A burst of static, and a voice said, loud and clear: “…the alleged sighting of a giant bird in Half-Moon Bay, California, continues to draw attention of Nessie and Bigfoot fans on both sides of the Atlantic. And now for our 24-hour weather forecast…”

  The static cut in again. The forecast was unnecessary. Mark could provide one himself: visibility very poor; cold rain; probably an accident ahead; and time wasted at the airport as the sullen security personnel palpated his shoes and sniffed his aftershave. This was his next 24 hours.

  Afterwards…who knows? The future lay ahead as blank as the fog. He had never been to the States before and the only mental image he could summon of Columbus, Ohio, was, incongruously, the white colonnaded front of the Columbus Hotel in Sussex Gardens. He knew the reason it popped up only too well. The first time with Julie, the first lie to Sharon.

  He glanced at his silenced cellphone and imagined Julie staring at her own device, a pouting smile and a tear-swollen rebuke superimposed upon each, flickering like a Schrödinger cat in its sealed box.

  He forced the image out of his mind and concentrated on driving. A lorry loomed ahead, and he braked sharply. This way he’d never make it to the airport. It’d be a pity to die at the age of thirty-five, leaving behind only a couple of broken hearts and a half-written book on evolutionary contingency.

  The traffic eased and Mark touched the familiar number in Krakow and let the phone ring. Mama would not answer, he knew, but what if… And the “what if” of Julie. He imagined the cellular network of possibilities wrapping up the Earth, signals bouncing through its intangible fibers, branching and propagating like seaweed. But at some point it had to stop. There was one number he would never call; one “what if” that was never going to become “maybe” again. He had his chance and he blew it.