Return to Skull Island (16 page)
Read Return to Skull Island Online
Authors: Ron Miller,Darrell Funk
We must have run for hours, but we finally reached the clearing with the altar. We only made it because we had the trail the brontosaurus had followed. Behind us, where Skull Mountain once towered was only a column of boiling black smoke and ash, laced with crawling bolts of lightning, like luminous snakes.
“What the hell happened?” I asked.
“I told you that the mountain was nothing but a volcanic plug. It was like a gigantic blackhead, forced up above the surface by pressure from the magma chamber below. It might have remained stable for another million years, but the dinosaurs’ uranium had reached a critical point where it had literally melted through the bottom of the mountain. The thing is sinking—or has sunk—into the chamber like a foundering ship.”
“What does that mean for us?”
“You remember Krakatoa?”
“Yes.”
“Well, don’t make me laugh.”
As she said this, the island shuddered and I saw a fountain of lava bigger than the Empire State Building rocket into the sky.
“Our only hope is the plane,” she said. “I can only pray to God the Japs left it intact.”
We had to make our way over the rubble of the fallen lintel in order to get through the gateway, but we were soon rushing through the abandoned village as palm trees swayed and crashed to the ground around us.
“Thank God!” Pat cried as she spotted the seaplane, moored just off shore. It was rocking wildly in the churning water, but otherwise seemed unharmed.
I heard an odd, hissing, pattering sound and then something hit me on the head. I glanced around and saw that it seemed to be raining. I held out my hand and a dozen grey little pellets landed in it. I recognized what it was. Ash from the volcano.
“We’d better get out of here quick,” I said, showing Pat the ash. “We can’t fly through this stuff.”
She nodded and we started to wade out to the plane. But before she got to it I called and she turned back to me.
“What about Andrews?” I asked.
“What?”
“What about Andrews? Where is he?”
“Well, we can’t look for him now. If he’s not in the village we’ll never find him.”
I thought that was pretty cold-blooded, but she was also dead right. There was no time to search the village. There might not even be time to get away.
“But what,” she suddenly asked, her eyes as round as copper pennies, “about the dinosaurs? What about Mr. and Mrs. Rex?”
I was so astonished that for a moment I couldn’t think of anything to say. She was more worried about those big lizards than she was about a fellow human being.
“They’ve managed to survive eleventy million years,” I said. “This is just a bump in the road for them.”
Then something dawned on me that hadn’t occurred to until that very moment. I had no idea how to fly a plane.
“Say,” I said, “I hope you’re not counting on me to fly this thing!”
“Of course not. Don’t be silly.”
I should have known better.
She climbed up on one of the pontoons and was opening the cabin door when I joined her. She squirmed into the pilot’s seat and I got in next to her.
“Keep your fingers crossed,” she said and I did.
The engine started immediately and I let out the breath I’d been holding the past five minutes.
“Normally these things have a range of about six or seven hundred miles. I’d had extra tanks put in, though, and with the special modifications my cousin made we should be able to squeeze a thousand out of her. And there are only the two of us in a plane designed to carry nine. Near as I can figure, Skull Island is—or maybe I should say
was
—somewhere southwest of the Chagos Archipelago.” She began taxiing the plane, turning it into the wind. “If they’re not more than a thousand miles away we might just make it. Even if we don’t it might not matter too much. We’ll be getting over some pretty heavy shipping lanes before then. If we spot a ship I can signal it and have us picked up.”
She pushed the throttle, we picked up speed and were soon in the air, putting Skull Island behind us at a rate of 155 miles an hour.
I pressed my face against my window. All I could see of the island was a towering column of black and white smoke and ash. I thought about our strange friends and felt a real pang of sorrow for them. They were nice and I liked them. It was their own fault, however.
Suddenly, there was a tremendous
BANG!
It was almost beyond the range of hearing, more a sensation felt in every cell of my body rather than my ears. I felt as though a gigantic hand had just squeezed me, like you’d squeeze the juice out of a lemon with your bare fist. The plane leaped like someone had just kicked it and I could see Pat—her face dead white, the cords in her neck and the muscles in her bare arms standing out like steel cables—fighting to keep the plane from turning end over end. A dazzling blaze of light lit the underside of the wings.
Skull Island was no more.
EPILOGUE
“And that was pretty much that,” Denham said. “As Pat had predicted, we saw a ship about four hours out. She circled it, landed and got picked up. It was a Dutch ship out of Batavia and bound for Cape Town, which was fine by us.”
“What happened to Pat?” I asked.
“Never saw her again,” he replied, looking down into his glass with an expression I couldn’t see. “When we got to Cape Town, Pat went to a cable office. When she returned she said she’d have to leave me there. She’d gotten word from that mysterious cousin of hers that she was desperately needed back in New York. All I saw of the cable was something about an Association of Physical Health. I saw from the look on her face that this meant more to her than me and that it was also apparently a lot more serious than it sounded. There was an Imperial Airways Hercules leaving for London in an hour, so we shook hands and that was the last I saw of her. Oh, I got a post card every now and then, for a few years, but that was all.”
“But . . .”
“I’d just as soon let it go at that, son.”
“Well, what about Andrews? I know he didn’t die on some remote island. I heard him talk at the Museum of Natural History only last year. He never said anything about the stuff you’ve been telling me.”
“Can you blame him? The truth is he abandoned Pat and me on that hellish island. After the battle at the wall, he took the boat she and I had left on the beach and took off. How he survived the explosion of the island and the subsequent tidal wave, I have no idea. But the fact remains that he was picked up by a trawler a week later, none the worse for wear. He had no idea Pat and I were alive until I got back to New York. I saw no reason to expose him. He’d been square enough until the very end, so I had no axe to grind. Anyway, it’s getting late and you were asking about the Abominable Snowman.”
“Oh, yes! I’d almost forgotten! Yes, indeed, I’d very much like to see that!”
Denham told me to follow him as he got up from the table. He was a lot steadier on his feet than I was, though I’d had no more to drink than he. He led me to a shack behind the saloon.
“It’s in there,” he said.
“The Abominable Snowman?”
“No, it’s Charlie MacCarthy. Of
course
, the Abominable Snowman. That’s what you came to see, isn’t it?”
Holding a forefinger to his lips, he motioned me to be quiet as he approached the shed’s door.
“You don’t want to startle them,” he whispered. “They can be vicious when spooked.”
He slowly and carefully opened the door. The interior was dark as pitch. As my eyes adjusted, I could see a whitish mass and could hear something growling.
“Is . . .is that it?”
“You bet your life it is.”
I leaned my head in further, and shielded my eyes with my hands against the glare of the surrounding landscape.
“It looks like a Mexican,” I said. “In a serape.”
“It’s the change in diet and climate,” Denham said. “You get that thing in a refrigerator and you’ll see something that’ll put hair on your chest.”
“I think he’s snoring.”
“They sound like that just before they attack. We’d better get back to the saloon. I don’t want to be responsible for anything that might happen to you.”
When we got back inside, Denham ordered more beer.
“It’s for sale,” he said.
“What’s for sale?”
“The Abominable Snowman. It’s for sale. It’d make the reputation of any zoologist.”
He was right about that. Even after all the beer he’d bought me, I could still think perfectly clearly. Why, it would be the discovery of the century! It’d leave the great white armadillo absolutely nowhere. But I knew that I needed to be canny about this. I needed to play my cards carefully.
“How much were you thinking?” I asked casually, making little circles in the moisture the bottle had left on the bar.
“How much do you have?”
This seemed like a reasonable question. “I guess maybe I’ve got twenty-five dollars. I was hoping it might be enough for train or bus fare back east.”
“Well, well. Twenty-five bucks. It’s exactly what I was going to ask for.”
It was every penny I had, but when I thought of what old Professor Brauda back at Wyanotta U. would say when I got back for the Fall semester—well, I knew it’d be worth every cent. I took out my wallet and counted out all the bills I had. I needed to fish around my pockets for all my loose change to make it all come out even, but I managed.
Denham pocketed the money and shook my hand.
“I know you won’t regret this, Mr. Molnar,” he said.
“I am sure I won’t,” I replied, thinking of Professor Brauda’s face.
He turned to me just before he left the saloon.
“Don’t take any wooden nickels, Molnar.”
And that was the last I ever heard of Carl Denham.