THE CRYPTID MENAGERIE, Part IV

Here was a dark room, filled with all sorts of animals in cages – only these beasts were ones he (and Science) recognized. One cage had a Snow Leopard, another held a Water Buffalo. Yet another held four Chimpanzees. A Stellar Sea Lion was on a slab, knocked out or dead. A bulky, male Orangutan sat in the corner of its cage – also in the corner of the room. Moose, Monitor Lizards, Crocodiles, some Salamanders in vats and some others he didn’t bother to try and recognize. Indeed, the standard Menagerie seemed to be here.

“Al, the creatures you saw – the modern megafauna that in-name-only ‘Scientists’ have been arrogant and cynical enough to lambast as myth and legend – were built. Constructed. Engineered, you could say.”

He could not say a thing, as it happened. He could only stare.

Finally, he found his voice.

“Engineered?”

“Yes, silly. We built them. Gene-by-Gene, like with Legos. That’s what these beasts here are all for.”

She swept her hand around the room, indicating the animals of the laboratory.

“The Sea Serpent? Genetic material from the Sea Lion, the Sperm Whale, the Crocodile. The Chupacabras? Vampire Bats, primarily, but also Leopards, Coyotes and Striped Hyenas. Bigfoot? Smart like Orangutans, Vicious like Chimps and Social like Bonobos. The Bipedalism and size was just a matter of tweaking. Any of the animals you saw, all of them are the results of years upon years of changing and crossing genetics until the animal that I wanted was there.”

Alva didn’t think he could feel anything anymore. He just stood there, his blood pressure dropping and his thoughts slipping one-by-one out of his mind as though drained out through a tube.

“I…I think I need to sit down,” he said, putting his hand to the side of his head.

“And soon, there’ll be more. Orang Pendek. Yiren, the yellow apes of China. Almas. Emela-Ntouka. Dover Devil, Champ, all will run loose on the Earth again. As they rightly deserve to.”

“Miss, you’re…” Telling crazy people they’re crazy is, generally, not a solution. So Alva thought. Tried to put his words together in a way that might please her.

“It’s not as strange as it might seem to the layman, Al. The University of Wyoming beat me to it first. They engineered Goats that produced spider-silk in their milk. I knew something of that sort was entirely possible beforehand, of course, but there’s a public example for you. If things as different as Goats and Spiders could be crossed, of course one could change and mix other genes. Eight years I’ve been working, with leaps forwards and steps back, until I’ve come to this.”

He nodded stiffly. ‘Somewhere, a Scientist is Crying,’ he thought.

“You did it all yourself?” He asked.

She rolled her eyes and sighed. “No, I didn’t.” She said, avoiding his gaze. “I’m a self-made billionaire. Well, my husband was. Before he had an accident, and left his entire fortune to me.” She grinned and looked up, as if she was remembering a fond childhood memory. “2.7 Billion, eight years and 750 million of which have gone into this project. And when I needed people to work for me, to build my beasts and to maintain them, I pulled Scientists from around the world. Our Chief Geneticist is Dominican, most of our Guards are High-School or College dropouts from remote parts of America and Britain, and as you can tell Mr. Shuker is Australian.”

Shuker tipped his hat at this, proud of his heritage. Al barely noticed.

“Why? Why Monsters?” He asked. “Why not Dinosaurs or Mammoths and Mastodons?”

She sighed, slumping her shoulders.

“Nobody can understand. The older I get, the more I realize that nobody ever really understands anybody. We’re all just looking through a cage of our own, and anything we think about anyone else is just our best guess. Quite often, it’s as wrong as wrong can be.”

She turned, motioning him to yet another room.

“Come. To my Quarters. All of your stand back, except Shuker.” The Guards did so.

* * *

Her quarters were equally modernist – square, black furniture with metal frames. A fireplace. Squarish and angular, high-contrast patterns on the drapes and counters and desks. The only natural things were the branches of a pine tree, a few feet away from the glass of the only window.

If he dove through that glass, could he reach the tree, climb down, and run away?

There was a framed picture on the wall of a group of African Fishers, waist-deep in water, trying to fend off a pair of Pterosaurs with knives and spears. A drawing, though he didn’t know the artist. Besides that one was a framed photograph of the Lake Champlain Monster, brown and gleaming in the sunlight.

On the walls were some photographs and degrees. It appeared Ms. Sanderson was a PhD of both Biology and Geology, and given what half the bookshelf was made up of she must have had an equally substantial understanding of Psychology even if she had no official status there.

“It began, as it always does, with curiosity. I do love that emotion most out of all of ‘em – it’s that one that leads to new discoveries. Progress. Fine thing, curiosity. Lovely, you could say.”

She went over to her desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out a book – an old one, it looked like. Hardback, worn at the tops and bottoms. Dark red with a black band on top. She held it lovingly to her chest, her slender and flawless fingers stroking its spine as though it was a living thing. She gazed out the Skylight, into the stars. Lost in time and dreaming.

“I was a little girl. My Father was upper-middle class, very conservative. He treated me like a Princess, but that wasn’t what I wanted to be. No, Daddy, I said. I wanted to be a Zoologist. I wanted to study animals, I said. He told me ‘No’ at first. I kept it up, though. He softened, gradually, over time, until by the time I was ten years old, trips to the Zoo all day every weekend were the norm. I loved it, loved it. I loved the big animals – the monsters, if you will. I would just sit and stare at them, at the Elephants and the Hippos. I would just sit as close as I could, watching them. Daddy or one of my Moms – I had so many in succession – would say, ‘Irene, don’t you want to go somewhere else today?’ They made the requisite offers. Ice Cream, Toys, Et Cetera. But no. No, I said. I wanted to look at the animals. I was lost. I was lost in how much I loved these animals.”

She sighed.

“Then, when I was Ten, I found this book. It was just sitting there in a Library, on the desk, like I was meant to find it. Of course, there were other kids who must’ve read it. I know that. I’m not crazy, though I’m sure you think so. I can tell by looking at you.”

Al didn’t know that the socially acceptable facial expression was for this occasion, so he didn’t make one. He just nodded and listened.

“You’re honest, that’s good. Anyways, I picked it up, read it, and just fell in love with it. On The Track of Unknown Animals, by Bernard Heuvelmans. It was old already, by the time I’d found it. But there it was nonetheless, a whole Encyclopaedia of Animals – and not just any animals, either, but huge ones. Majestic ones. Ones so strange and beautiful and awesome that to have even just one stuffed specimen would put an entire Zoo to unending Shame.”

She placed the book back down on her desk, gently, and turned her sparkling blue eyes towards him.

“Some were reclusive in huge, cold, black lakes, like Loch Ness and the other Water-Devils of Europe. Others were manlike, primates most definitely in shape and form. Bigfoot and Yeti, yes, but also Yiren, Almas and Yowie. Some were terrifying – the Ahool of Vietnam, an awful thing indeed. The Orang-Bati of Indonesia. I had frequent dreams of those ones, swarming and circling in great, black circles around a small boat of mine. Diving one at a time, each one taking a shot at me and whoever happened to be sharing the boat with me in the dream, if anyone.”

“Must’ve been unpleasant,” Al said cautiously, trying to get as close to her good side as he could if such a thing was possible.

“Not as bad as you’d think, son. Not as bad as you’d think.”

She sat in the Chair by her desk, putting her legs around the back and resting her chin on her hands, like a schoolgirl might do. Her eyes were still wide with awe, and staring at him. As though she was staring through him, not at him; at whatever mad vision of nature had sprawled before her in her mind.

“I studied anything and everything I could get my hands on. The stranger it was, the more plausible it seemed. An Air-breathing Plesiosaur would have to surface too often to make it a candidate for Nessie or Champ; not only that, the large reptile wouldn’t survive the cold, black waters of those lakes. Nor could it have survived sixty or so million years without changing or leaving imprints in the fossil record. But others, real Scientists – they had ideas.”

She brushed some hair out of her eyes, then continued.

“Ted Holiday proposed large invertebrates – like worms or Mollusks, but massive. Upwards of twelve feet in length. The Great Orm of Loch Ness, he titled the book of his theories. Later he made them Devils from another dimension, which is entirely feasible but completely untestable. He lost my interest after that. Animals were my life, not parallel universes.

  “But R.T. Gould got it right in the forties. The Loch Ness Monster could only be an Amphibian. They didn’t show up on Sonar but occasionally – because after feeding, they would lie at the bottom and not be swimming freely. They could absorb the Oxygen of the water, like all amphibians. The long neck could be not just for springing on passing fish, but also for snatching things off the shore or dragging them away…”

Al remembered the doe and shuddered violently, much to Sanderson’s obvious delight.

“In fact, the first time it was seen, it was carrying something back to the Loch. Over thirty accounts describe it breaching land. Six of which involve it attacking things, like Fisherman’s boats or dogs or such.”

She looked upwards, closing her eyes. Remembering fondly.

“It was my own Hypothesis that the monster’s Horns were motion sensors, detecting the moving water created by, say, a school of fish. Or a particularly large Sturgeon. Or an unlucky Swimmer.”

He found his voice. He tried to play along with this Woman’s obsession with mythic monsters and decided to ask her a Zoology-related question. He hoped it would endear him to her a little more.

“Has it ever killed somebody?”

She sighed.

“Well, if it killed someone they wouldn’t have lived to tell anyone, now would they?”

“Bigfoot Attacks are so common, though, they border on Cryptozoological Cliché. It started with the attack on a Cabin of Hunters in 1924 – they laid siege while the Hunters simply fired out the windows. Stupidly, they’d shot a Bigfoot in the Evening, setting off the attack. My Sasquatches, of course, are very thick-skinned. A bullet would infuriate them, not drop them. It’ll be amusing when an enterprising redneck fires at one, thinking he’s won the Zoological Goldmine.”

“Can they be brought down?” He asked, cautious.

She shrugged. “Well, sure. If a Hippopotamus can be, than a Sasquatch should be mortal, too. Such is Nature’s greatest strength, the ability to replenish itself. A Bigfoot, however – especially a full-grown Bull – would take a lot more than Shotgun spray. A Slug to the head might do it, if the Gun-wielder has skill and fortune on his side. But, like with any particularly massive animal, more powerful artillery would need to be on hand. The kind not readily available to anyone in the Northwest, that’s for sure.”

“At’s why I carry the Auto, kid.” Shuker said, reassuring him with a tap to the shoulder. “If I’m gonna have lethal weapons, that one’s a must-have.”

She scowled at them. “God willing, you’ll never use it, Aussie.” She got up and went over to a counter, making some Coffee. Shuker did what he did customarily when enraged by his superiors and chewed on his tongue. He thought about how, if he kept this up, he’d have gnawed his own tongue off by the time he reached age thirty.

“Anyways,” She continued, “Solitary Sasquatches continued to attack teenagers, both in the open and in their cars, in secluded and solitary places. They continued to lurk outside houses. They continued to kill and eat dogs and cats throughout the 50’s and 60’s, doubtlessly inspiring endless B-movie monsters. I have no doubt we only heard from those who got away.

  “I tried to present my hypotheses and studies in School. Teachers ripped me apart. They mocked me. Laughter was constant amongst all the adults. All of them.”

She looked out the window, chewing her nails. Thinking. Still not happy after all these years.

“As you can tell, being of diminutive stature, I got picked on a lot. The other girls were all bigger and stronger than me. None smarter, but intelligence is the least desirable trait in teenagers.”

“I do too.” It was his attempt at gaining some kind of sympathy from her. “It happens to everyone.”

It must have failed. Her face grew strange and cold. The emotion behind her eyes was something like anger or loathing, but still more foreign. Reptilian. Primal.

“Sometimes the bigger girls would punch me. Trip me. Spit on me. I was once pushed down a flight of stairs. It went all the way up until High School. Some pretended to be my friends. Until I trusted them enough to share my locker. They stole my clothes after Gym, stuck rotting food in there instead. They all just laughed and laughed and laughed. A boy asked me out, then ditched me at the mall. One day I just broke down after I read a note stuck in my desk. I cried and cried and cried. But I kept this book in a safe at home, along with all the others. I read and read and read, and when I was 22 I went to College for the closest courses to Cryptozoology available. I continued to pursue anything related to the mystery beasts. I regularly contributed to the Fortean and Paranormal Journals, seeking truth. Promoting my Theories. I had the opportunity to debate another Cryptozoologist at a conference in Springfield, Illinois. His theory was that the N’yamala – he preferred the name ‘Mokele-Mbembe’ – was a living Dinosaur, mine that it was a gargantuan Lizard. Something along the lines of a Monitor or an Iguana.” She laughed to herself. “I can’t wait until I re-capture the one I have. The look on his face alone would’ve made the entire endeavor worth it.”

“Listen, Ms. Sanderson,” He started, trying to summon up the most likeable, persuasive parts of himself to the Madwoman who now had her back to him. “I know I won’t convince you not to go along with whatever your plan is at this late stage, but just because the animals you love so much never were there…”

The thunder of what followed rendered him open-mouthed, shaking and terrified more so than any beast he’d seen on the tour he’d been forced along tonight.

“THEY WERE THERE!” She shrieked, smashing a black Coffee cup against the counter and shattering it. “THEY WERE THERE! The eyewitness accounts! The sonar in the lakes and the footprints in the woods! THEY WERE THERE!”

A white, foamy string of drool was seeping out of her mouth. She was hyperventilating, her eyes completely void of any kinds of emotions that occurred naturally in human beings.

She composed herself just barely. Enough to continue her speech, at least.

“Humankind,” she re-started, vicious but under her breath, “annihilated them. Deforestation. Global Warming. Pollution. All of these things killed them off, one by one by one. Nessie couldn’t survive the temperature changes from the ocean currents that flow into Loch Ness. Bigfoot couldn’t find enough food after deforestation obliterated so much of its food supply. The big game Thunderbirds relied upon, the Yeti’s frigid ice-caps, the swamps the Bunyips needed and the Desert animals the Chupacabras relied on; all of it was brought down in a single century by the disease of the Earth known as Man.”

Al held his arms up in weak defense. He was close to hyperventilating now.

“O.K., O.K., the Cryptids were real.” He said weakly, trying to re-evaluate the situation in his head and figure out a more adept survival tactic. It was a shame Classes were taught on subjects he’d never need, like Algebra and Trigonometry, but things like ‘surviving at the mercy of a lunatic’ were not.

“What I do here is a necessity. Righting one of humanity’s many sick, unnatural wrongs. Not only will I ‘discover’ them…” She indicated the word discover with that two-fingered quote thing that had always reminded Al of a disturbed person imitating a T. Rex. “Thus proving they were always there to an unsuspecting Scientific Community, and claiming the fame I deserve, but also will they enact revenge upon humanity for the many infractions that they have placed upon the living wonders of this world.”

He asked what exactly she meant by ‘revenge.’

She shook her head.

“These animals, for the most part, are either very hostile to humankind or simply very dangerous to anything they happen to come across. The Sasquatch are the former, instinctively destroying human habitations such as cabins and tents and engineered with a taste for flesh as well as vegetation. They can use tools, like very large sticks and rocks and boulders. The N’yamala is an example of the latter, killing anything it can overpower. Given it’ll be released in Lake Tele and its surrounding areas, the native pygmies won’t be serving up much of a fight.”

“That’s not true for all of them,” He said. “The Yetis and the Ogopogo seemed very…uh, tempered. I mean, as far as I can see.”

She poured her coffee and walked over to him, sitting in the chair closest to him. She drank it black.

“You’re rather observant,” she smirked. “Or did my Great White Hunter tell you so, in a weak moment of Sympathy?”

Shuker didn’t even pay attention. He was looking at the wall, pretending to contemplate something else. Al remembered that in one of the Hannibal Lecter Novels he’d read, there was a group of professional kidnappers seeking out the titular Serial Killer. One amongst them was described as ‘telling targets everything they wanted to hear before he killed them.’

Was Shuker employing this same tactic?

A split-second later Shuker asked if there was any Green Tea. She pointed him to a cabinet. He grabbed a red plastic cup, went over to the sink next to Sanderson, and filled it with hot water and a little packet of Splenda, dipping the teabag in rhythmically. It seemed to calm him. If only something could calm Sanderson.

“I thought perhaps it was a little too shallow to build all my beasts as bloodthirsty, so I made the Yetis pacifists with a tendency to protect native herbivores and perhaps the occasional lost man. The Ogopogo I made a panicky, elusive beast. Also an experiment, in the finest tradition of Science.”

She sipped the last half of her Coffee all at once. She clenched her eyes, breathed fast, and then went over and poured more without hesitation.

She held the pot out to him with a mocking smile of hospitality. He shook his head. She continued.

“How humanlike does a beast have to be to be sympathetic?” She asked, again avoiding eye-contact, visualizing yet another new scenario. “It’ll be interesting to see how man reacts. I expect ‘Save the Yeti’ ads on Television within the next two years. They’re so humanlike, they’re herbivorous, they only kill in self-defense. Though they can self-defend – we released a Snow Leopard into their habitat, the big male decapitated it after it went for the young one.” She sipped her drink, savoring it this time. “They don’t use tools of any kind, and they allow human proximity in their caves, provided the humans don’t show any overtly threatening behavior. The Ogopogo, on the other hand, is fairly ugly – as it should be. A molting animal with small eyes, tubular nostrils and a fat hump for storage isn’t exactly a fine sight to behold. Especially basking on a rock in the late night. That puking habit it has wasn’t intentional, but it’s a nice touch towards my experiment.”

“I imagine they’ll both have their supporters,” Alva said. “I don’t know whose activists outnumber whose, but Gorillas and Whales both have their fans amongst Greenpeace and P.E.T.A., so I think these things will too. Can’t speak to some of the more upsetting ones. Particularly that worm…”

“Mussie, yes. The Mollusk. Holiday’s work on Loch Ness Invertebrates partially inspired that one, but also the reports out of Muskrat lake. They described animals that moved in up-and-down undulations, which is something only found in swimming mammals and invertebrates. Since we already had a monster mammal for Okanagan we decided on a gargantuan Mollusk. The Vampirism was inspired by Lampreys and Leeches. Also to give stupid teenagers a fittingly gruesome end.”

He shook his head, reclining and trying to put together words in a fashion that might conceivably be appropriate to the situation.

“Since I have all of their behaviors, their life-cycles and predispositions fully understood, I stand very little chance of being killed or otherwise harmed by them. So I’ll have no trouble finding them again. Or naming them and categorizing them in my Scientific Papers. Maybe I can even get a book out of it. Wouldn’t that be nice? Knowing the Unknown Animals, I could call it. What Heuvelmans wanted to be, I could be myself. Wouldn’t it be just…” She sipped her Coffee. “…Incredible?”

“This, this plan of yours. It’s…so many people will have to die, just so you can have your fame and glory. It’ll be worse when Scientists actually look at the damn things. They’ll study their genetics, and they’ll figure out they’re not real. They’re not anything the biosphere evolved. Their mixed genetics will out them as engineered monsters, and they’ll know somebody built them.” He may have hit upon his only chance for survival, or the final insult that would guarantee his death. But if he didn’t try to appeal to her sense of reason he’d be killed anyway. No matter how slim her sense of reason was, if she was intelligent enough to man this kind of station she must’ve at least held some remnants of sanity.

“These things, you intend to find all of them? I’ve seen more than a dozen here, don’t you think that around the fourth or fifth new species, Scientists will get suspicious? The places you plan to set them loose, they’re places with their own species and ecologies. These new ones will do more damage than anything humankind has done. They’ll push other species into extinction, like rats did when introduced to the Islands of the Dodos.”

Shuker, for the first time since they’d entered this room, actually brought some bearing onto the subject in question.

“He’s right. Pigs are already doing it in Australia, so are Rabbits. We’ve lost Tasmanian Tigers already, it’ll be like this the whole world ‘round after these things go marching in, so to speak.” He laughed to himself. Alva and Sanderson, having never heard of ‘The Saints Go Marching In”, didn’t react.

“I don’t care much for the more obscure ones, to be honest.” She said, glaring to her best ability at the child in the chair near her. “Let some late-night Swimmers discover Mussie or some hunters the Leeds Devil. I’ll simply claim the Australian ones at first, as part of Shuker’s contract included no animals released in his homeland…”

“Well, it’s my Home, and I want a safe place to retire to after I’m done here. There’s enough hostile introduced animals there to begin with, we don’t need Bunyips and Yowies skulkin’ around, too.”

“…and I’ll discover and claim the big ones.” She went on as though he said nothing at all. “Nessie, Sasquatch, Yeti. That’ll be enough fame for me.”

Alva nodded.

“You realize, after you find them, you’ll have to turn them over to Scientists for study, right?”

She nodded. “Yeeees, that’s kind of a necessity to the plan…”

“And they’ll examine their genetics, right?”

She nodded again.

He waited for her epiphany, and when it didn’t come, he out-righted stated it as though she were the child, and he the adult.

“They’ll see they’re mix-and-match monsters. They’ll see they didn’t evolve in nature, that they were put together by a creator. Knowing Genetic engineering is possible and figure you have peculiar luck with finding these animals, I’m compelled to think they’ll put two and two together and figure out this scheme. Though I’m sure the first one to figure it out will get laughed out of the auditorium considering how ludicrous this all is.”

He realized he’d just insult a rich, bipolar and very megalomaniacal sociopath. Granted, his odds of surviving weren’t terribly good to begin with, but he may have just taken his one-in-a-million chance to see the sun rise again and sunk it like the Titanic.

She just smirked at him.

Considering what this woman enjoyed – like, say, engineering unstoppable killing machines to release all over the world, for example – a smirk could not possibly have been a good sign.

“With the added money of my discoveries, I assure you, Keel, that I’ll have my fame and glory. Anyone who dares contradict me will either be convinced by my flawless arguments, or they’ll find themselves on the wrong end of one of my discoveries.”

She finished her second cup of coffee and put it down on the table.

“You, as a matter of fact, will be the second example of that.”

He stumbled over his words, trying to say something. Anything that might counter the statement she’d made.

“The first was the idiot handler who allowed the Thunderbird to escape. You know, that one you killed.”

He stumbled. Wanted not to panic, but did.

“That thing tried to kill me!” He blurted out.

“That thing cost more money to bring to life than you would make if you lived your life ten times over! That thing was more important to the progress of the world than you can ever hope to be! You are nothing in the eye of any animal here, and you damn well know it!”

“Miss, I…I…”

“That Handler found himself with the Leeds Devil. The aftermath was…messy.  Beautifully gruesome, if you like. Nature in full-fury. Gorgeous. A wonderful show, and not just in my opinion. The Guards got a kick out of it, too. So you can at least take comfort in knowing you won’t face that one. No use feeding an animal that’s already satiated. But you’ll find yourself on the sore end of one of them, you can be sure.”

He felt frozen in time. Seconds became months and years. He couldn’t move.

“You’re goddamned INSANE, Lady! You’re psychotic, and I have to suffer for it? People will notice I’m missing! They’ll…”

“They’ll never figure out where you are. We’re fifty miles away from where we found the Thunderbird. This Zoo is the last of a Ghost Town in a thick forest. Nobody will ever even know you were here – and if anyone does suspect, I can have them killed. So many poisons can’t be traced in an autopsy, so many accidents happen every day…”

“Look, lady,” he said, pleading, trying to appeal to whatever humanity this woman might have had. “I understand, you want these things to be real, but just splicing DNA and making custom-cryptids isn’t gonna bring that dream to life. You don’t even need to release them, you could just patent the engineering process and start selling custom-pets to rich people! You could exhibit these things and have a ‘Jurassic Park’, you’d make back twice the money you sank into this place in two weeks. You don’t have to go through with this half-baked scheme, and you sure-as-Hell don’t have to kill me. Please, you could just let me go, I’d never say anything, I could just say a Mountain Lion attacked me. You could just get whatever doctor at the med ward who took care of me to say he found me, please, I…”

She wasn’t listening to him. She was slumped back, fingers locked over her mouth, an infinitely complex and equally mad plan for him formulating behind her eyes even as he tried to reason with her.

He went numb. It was hopeless.

 “You think you’ve decimated my plans. How adorable. So what fits you better, Keel? Bunyip or Serpent? Or Nessie? What do you fear more, dark lakes or thick forests? The choices are endless, of course. I won’t make up my mind here.”

She got up and walked over to Shuker.

“Bring him back to the Med building, same room as before. I’ll relay you with further orders once I decided what to do.”

Tonight would be the night that he would die.