Time & Space (Short Fiction Collection Vol. 2) (10 page)

Gathering his courage, Charles inspected the mutilated bodies closer, with a scientist’s eye, not as a clergyman. He quickly discovered the horrifying truth. These men hadn’t died by musket balls, or swords. Their bodies weren’t blown apart from cannon fire or exploding gunpowder kegs. They were covered in scratches and puncture wounds. They looked like claw marks. Was that possible? Had body after mutilated body been physically torn limb from limb?

FitzRoy thought Charles had gone mad, of course, until Charles pointed out to him the neat parallel grooves cleaving apart a nearby torso, the claw marks so grievous the dead man’s sternum was deeply scratched. There was also no rational explanation for a disembodied head that was lying nearby, a fist-sized puncture hole smashed through its cranium, the empty brain cavity gleaming as though it had been recently licked clean. The facts were mysterious, but indisputable. There had been no war. No mutiny had taken place. These sailors had been attacked, savaged, and from the missing appendages and shredded wounds present on the remaining body parts, partially devoured.

Who could have done such a heinous act? Or perhaps, what? Man, or Beast? Unfortunately, they were about to get their answer.

The creatures suddenly appeared from out of nowhere, bursting out of the shrubbery about thirty feet to their left. Fifteen of them, maybe more, and Charles’ blood ran ice cold as he turned and gazed into their black, lifeless eyes for the first time. He was positive this afternoon was a nightmare now, and these strange beasts were all the proof he needed to fully convince himself, for no animal species such as these had ever walked the real world.

His body rooted to the spot by primal fear, Charles’ ever-curious scientific mind had escaped the terror long enough to study the monstrous creatures who ignored their presence for the moment, concentrating on finishing the body-scraps they’d left behind earlier.

He wanted to label them as Marine Iguanas, which were plentiful on those islands. They also came close to matching these beasts immense six-foot length, but no species of iguana was carnivorous. The body shape wasn’t right either—these animals were far sleeker looking, more snake-like than the bulkier bodied iguanas. The coloring was wrong also—these feasting creatures were slate gray with an off-white throat, whereas the Marine Iguana was green with a fiery orange belly.

If Charles hadn’t known better, he’d have said they were large Monitor Lizards. Monitors are meat eaters, but are Old World creatures, indigenous to places like Australia, New Zealand, and most of Africa. None had ever been documented in the Galapagos area, or even South America for that matter, and certainly none had ever been considered man-eaters.

Then it dawned on Charles, in a moment of perfect clarity before all hell broke loose, that what he was looking at was a completely unknown species. A sort of lizard-iguana hybrid that no other man had ever documented. He’d have been thoroughly fascinated by these ferocious yet stunningly beautiful creatures, had he not been so deathly afraid at that moment.

It was Charles’ fear that ultimately saved his life. While he was trying unsuccessfully to categorize the monsters, two of Captain FitzRoy’s crewmen made a break for it, screaming in tandem as they tried to scurry back up the steep volcanic ridge. Their high-pitched wails and frantic movement immediately attracted a crowd. Both men were brought down quickly – their agony mercifully cut short. Charles saw only a blur of lightning fast pursuit, a flash of razor sharp teeth, a gnashing of powerful jaws, and then there was nothing left of the men but two crimson splashes on the hot black sand.

A third crewman decided to make a dash for the trees, thinking the creatures were preoccupied tearing his mates to shreds. Two creatures raced after him, catching up to the doomed sailor just as he reached the tree line. He tried to climb his way to safety, but was dragged back down to ground level. Instead of immediately setting into him with their teeth, the nearest beast turned its back to him, arced its long muscular tail high in the air, and brought it crashing down on the back of the struggling man’s head, puncturing a four-inch hole in his skull. The sailor twitched for a full minute before lying still, his two killers fighting above him to see which would taste his steaming brains first.

Amid all that turmoil, amid all that death, Charles’s mind was spinning – thinking about the smashed turtle shells strewn about the desolate island. He’d been gathering bits and pieces of the puzzle for four years, but standing on that blood-smeared beach, something clicked, and it all started to come together. Not just about these creatures, and how they’d grown bigger, stronger, and savagely carnivorous in a part of the world where nothing like them had ever existed, but it came together regarding all life on the planet. Evolution! Charles finally understood how it really worked, how the most important factor – the key factor – was the environment that a species lived in.

The giant lizard-iguana creatures had developed a hard scorpion-like tail, simply because they’d had to, in order to survive. As meat eaters, and large ones at that, their prime source of food would have been the giant Tortoises. To thrive as a species, they’d had to develop a way to crack through the turtle’s thick outer shell to get to the sweet life-giving meat within. If their main source of food had been an animal such as a deer or a goat, they wouldn’t have needed the bone-piercing tail. Therefore, it was their environment that had dictated the evolutionary change. Take any other species, establish them in a different environment, and they’d evolve to meet the needs of this new environment – or die off it they weren’t strong enough to adapt. Survival of the fittest – it finally made sense!

There was a commotion behind Charles, about two hundred feet out into the bay, but he was too caught up in the moment of his revelation, to notice. Captain FitzRoy snapped him out of his reverie by yanking on his arm, pointing toward the open ocean. Charles turned and saw a large area of water beside the abandoned American ship churning like there’d been a silent explosion beneath the otherwise calm surf. A mammoth beast reared its gargantuan head out of the depths, bearing the same sleek snake-like visage as the carnivores that feasted on the beach, only considerably bigger. Judging by the head and shoulders, this monstrosity must have easily measured twenty feet in length – maybe twenty-five. It began tearing the side of the whaling vessel apart, easily ripping its way into the cargo holds where thousands of pounds of whale meat awaited its ravenous appetite.

A slight inland wind carried the pungent smell of raw mammal to the creatures roaming the black sand beach. As a group – like someone had rang the dinner bell – they all raced for the water to join their huge gluttonous brethren. Within seconds, Charles, Captain FitzRoy, and the one remaining crewman found themselves blessedly alone, forgotten about in the wake of the new discovery of food. They wasted no time, taking advantage of their good fortune and made their escape while they had the chance.

At the top of the volcanic ridge, Charles stopped to take one last look at the grisly charnel scene below on the beach, and at the mysterious unknown creatures thrashing about in the sea. The three survivors quickly made their way back to the Beagle, and made a solemn vow to each other, that they would never talk of what they had just been witness to. Officially, the landing party never found the American sailor’s camp, and the three dead crewmen would be reported as missing and presumed drowned. Nothing of that day’s events would ever be entered into the ship’s log…

***

Lying was easy for them when they were basically on their own, half way around the world – it was living with the truth that became the hard part. The surviving crewman jumped ship at the very next safe harbor, never to be seen or heard from again. Captain FitzRoy would keep his vow of silence, but the strain of the secret may have been a contributing factor in his later decent into depression and his subsequent suicide in 1865. As for my great-great-grandfather, that strange day would forever be engraved in Charles’ thoughts, memories, and in his progressively grim dreams.

The unknown species of six feet long lizard-iguana creatures had certainly terrified him, but they weren’t the source of his growing obsession. It was the twenty-foot monster gorging in the bay that troubled Charles so. That day on Tower Island had solidified his thoughts and ideas about evolution into what he would call Natural Selection, meaning species evolving naturally according to their environments. Charles also penned the term Unnatural Selection, but he only referred to it in those private journals I spoke of earlier. Unnatural Selection deals with species evolving in an unnatural way – evolutionary change that is a mistake or a freak of nature. The gargantuan lizard-iguana creature would never exist in a perfect world, but as you and I know, this world is far from perfect, and since evolution is happening around us every minute of every day, we’re bound to get an unnatural aberration from time to time. Especially now, what with the way scientists are so pretentiously tampering with the genetic code – the very building blocks of life itself.

There are things out there in this huge crazy world, we still don’t know about yet. Things being born, things being created, things that have existed for eons, but are only now ready to come out of the shadows to make our sadly unprepared acquaintance. Unnatural Selection doesn’t end there either. There are things being manipulated into existence, behind the well-funded closed doors of medical and military research laboratories all around the world.

Even man, as a species, is changing. We’re getting bigger, stronger, faster, and intelligent enough that we can now grab a petri-dish and a gene splicer, and take turns playing God. Right now, as we speak, unethical testing is taking place on human subjects, with hideous results. Humans are evolving into things that neither God, nor nature ever intended. And it will get much worse, before it ever gets better.

My great-great-grandfather kept his fears of evolution going haywire, and his dreams of myriad unnatural beasts running rampant throughout the world, hidden. He was scared and had his reputation to consider. I can respect that, but not for a minute do I agree with his stand. I think it was his responsibility – and now mine – to inform the public of all these unnamed, unknown, unpredictable things that are out there, waiting, biding their time until we let our guard down once too often.

This is the reason I’ve invited you here tonight. I have a proposition for you. Like Charles, I too suffer from terrible dreams about humanity’s future, which is why I’ve decided to dedicate my life to carrying on my famous ancestor’s legacy – scanning the globe for telltale signs that my family’s most secret fears are starting to come true. What will I discover on my own dark journey of discovery? To be honest I have absolutely no idea, but I’m hoping you’ll come with me, to join the hunt so to speak. What’s that? Where will we start? Well, that’s the easy part. We’ll start where all the best monster stories begin.

We’ll find somewhere dark…

STORY NOTES

This piece of fiction has always been one of my favorites and thought I’d put it here after you’ve read All That Glitters… because that strange species of subterranean golden men are exactly the type of unnatural things our good doctor Darwin will be out searching for out there in the dark. Hopefully he doesn’t find them – lol!

I’ve always loved stories and books where the writer takes real characters and events from history and spins something fantastic or horrific into what actually happened. I’ve written several historical horror stories like this and I’m currently working on a couple of much longer works in this same vein as well. This tale is actually an introductory story that I wrote for an evolutionary horror anthology I edited called UNNATURAL SELECTION: A Collection Of Darwinian Nightmares. I played with the ending a little here, just to give it more closure and feel more like a stand-alone short story but it’s a really good collection; one I’m very proud of. You might still be able to find it out there in Ebay and Amazon-land. Someday I’d like to release the ebook of this collection again but the logistics of finding all the authors again and getting them to give me permission to reprint their stories is going to have to wait until I’m a little less busy. I’ll work on it, though. Promise.

THE SUICIDE MAN

The alarm clock went off like a neutron bomb, ruthlessly assaulting the sleeping man’s nerves, jump starting him instantly awake. It wasn’t exactly good for the old ticker and definitely a bad way to start the day.

Simon Taylor rose out of bed only to fall into a deep black pit of depression upon opening his eyes. His first thought wasn’t a happy one.

I need to kill myself today. I can’t take this anymore. Everything’s the same… nothing has changed. Same old crappy bedroom in the same old crappy apartment.

His eyes scanned his surroundings just to be sure. He saw dirty bed sheets dotted with cigarette burns, cheap broken thrift shop furniture on a threadbare blue carpet, faded tacky wallpaper smeared with countless mildew stains running clear up to the crumbling ceiling which threatened to collapse down on him at any moment. No, nothing had changed. Simon was still in the same shithole as yesterday!

A ray of golden sunshine reflected into Simon’s eyes, drawing his attention to where it glinted off the surface of the large mirror across the room. It was one of those full-length standup dressing mirrors, all battered and ancient but a tiny seed of hope planted itself in Simon’s brain as he gazed over at it.

“Maybe it’s
me
that has changed? Maybe today I’ll look different?”

He scurried out of bed and raced over to the mirror. His recurring hope, futile as it was, had him metamorphosing overnight into some kind of younger version of Robert Redford complete with bright blue eyes and sparkling white teeth. Hope, once again, died at the mirror.

The silver backed glass revealed a pale, sickly man who looked every second of his fifty-six years, and then some. Statistically, at five foot nine, one hundred and ninety pounds, Simon was fairly close to average proportions but somehow statistics didn’t count for a hell of a lot compared to the stark honest reality of a mirror’s reflection. He had a small skeletal frame (bird boned, as his father used to constantly tease) and was sadly lacking in the muscle tone department which caused the bulk of his weight – fatty tissue – to appear far more prominently that it should. His fat sagged loosely off his bones in thick jiggling ripples of jaundiced flesh, and the rest of the picture wasn’t much better. Simon’s arms seemed
way
too long, his legs too stubby, and far more grey hair adorned his shoulders and back than had ever graced the balding crown of his oversized, lumpy cranium. In short, the man in the mirror staring back at Simon wasn’t Robert Redford. Not even the older version. Not even close! He looked more like a mountain gorilla than a movie star.