Professor Challenger: The Kew Growths and Other Stories Read online

  For what seemed like hours I followed Challenger’s broad back. I was never able to see much more than a few yards ahead, expecting at any second that an attack would come lumbering out of the cloud. I was surprised when the snow stopped and the sun briefly broke through the mist. We stood in a clear patch of ground nearly fifty yards in diameter. As I turned to my right, a huge gray lumbering figure seemed to rear up out of the cloud. I raised my hands in surrender … and laughed when my own shadow, cast against a wall of cloud, also raised its arms.

  “There’s your bogle, Challenger,” I said. “A trick of light and fog, no more than that.”

  A rough cough from inside the mist answered me, and as quickly as it had opened up, the cloud closed in around us again. We stood still for several minutes, but the sound was not repeated.

  Once more I followed Challenger’s back as he led us along a narrow track.

  I knew that, given how far we had walked, we had left the main peak of the Beinn behind. Indeed, the path started to descend into a corrie, firstly down a mild slope, then onto steeper ground where we had to slide on our rear ends for long stretches. For once I was glad of the thick cloud, for it cleared once on our way down and showed us to be perched only yards from the edge of a vertiginous drop of several hundred feet to the valley below. I clenched my buttocks as if that would somehow help my hold on the path and scrambled downward.

  I was almost relieved to come to a halt on a ledge before a dark damp cave.

  “Surely you don’t intend to beard the beast in its lair?” I asked in dismay.

  Challenger didn’t answer. He walked into the cave.

  The beast wailed from inside.

  I was not about to abandon my old friend to his fate. Besides, a wind got up, stronger than ever, and the snow began falling steadily again. If I stayed where I was there was a fair chance of getting blown off the hill to fall to the valley floor. I knew from my glimpses on the way down that I wouldn’t survive such a tumble.

  I followed Challenger into the cave.

  The interior was dry and smelled like a cowshed on a hot summer’s day. I was most surprised to see pictographs on the walls. They looked like they had been daubed in blood, and were, in the main, crude representations of animals and birds. Three large hairy beasts were depicted in a whiter pigment, cavorting under what I took to be a full moon.

  I did not have time for a closer inspection. Challenger had already moved deeper in the cave, following the beast’s howls. I went after him.

  I soon came to a wider chamber, only dimly lit by what little sun penetrated this far inside. Challenger stood there, a bemused expression on his face. There was no other exit apparent … but he was quite alone. There was no sign of any beast, nor that one had been here for a very long time.

  My eyes were immediately drawn to the debris that littered the floor. To my left was little more than a jumble of what looked like skeletal remains of deer and rabbit. But to my right three small bodies had been laid neatly to rest. Even in their desiccated state I recognized the conical heads and the gray, patchy fur.

  They had young.

  Challenger knelt beside the corpses.

  “These are ancient,” he said. “The dry air has mummified them, and it is hard to tell exactly how old they might be. But it is many centuries, by my estimation.”

  He reached into his jacket and took out the envelope. He showed me where a patch of fur on one of the bodies had been disturbed. “A small animal—wildcat, or maybe a pine marten, has been at these. That’ll be how the hair got out onto the moor.”

  “But what of the big ones up on the hill? Where have they gone?”

  Challenger suddenly looked old and tired. “I am not sure they were ever there. Did I not ask you? Did you not see?”

  “See what?”

  “There were no footprints in the snow, not up on the hill, or on the path that led us here. The beasts were never there.”

  Of course my mind was immediately full of questions, but Challenger was on the move again, heading back to the cave entrance.

  “We will be back with some light and some proper equipment,” he said. “But for now, we’d best be getting off this hill.”

  We were not going anywhere anytime soon. The snow had whipped up into a blizzard, the wind roaring diagonally across the cave entrance. To attempt a descent would have been suicide. What is more, the light was starting to go. It seemed we would be spending the night in the cave.

  We would not go hungry, for we still had sandwiches and a second Dewar flask of tea. We also had plenty of smokes, but came up short on materials to make a fire. We withstood it for as long as we could, but in the end there was no other choice. Challenger was almost beside himself with despair, but we had to burn the carcasses, saving only a single skull that Challenger put carefully into his backpack.

  The mere act of smoking a cigarette calmed me somewhat, and the growing heat from our small fire started to dispel some of my blue funk from earlier, but I was still on edge, expecting an attack at any moment.

  Challenger, however, seemed lost deep in thought.

  “Do you know what we have lost?” he said as we sat, finally warm, around the fire.

  “Never mind that, old man,” I said. “What about the things on the hill? We both saw them.”

  “Yes, we did,” Challenger replied. “But I am equally certain they were never really there. Beasts that size could not survive on the meager offerings available up here. Not now … but they might have thousands of years ago.”

  “But we saw them. We heard them.”

  Challenger nodded. “I even smelled them. But I cannot deny the evidence. They made no footprints. It seems the minister was right. My personal philosophy will need to be realigned to encompass this new information.”

  I too was struggling to comprehend.

  “Perhaps,” I said haltingly. “If there are indeed such things as ghosts, they are not confined to man alone?”

  “Or it may be, as I suspect, that our close cousins share more than just our physical nature … it may be they share a spiritual heritage as well? It is something I must think further upon. But it did indeed feel to me as if we were somehow led here, as if we were meant to find these children.”

  That gave me more food for thought than I was willing to digest at that moment. The rigors of the day finally caught up with me. I felt weary to my bones and nodded into a kind of semi-waking doze by the fire. Eventually it turned into sleep.

  I woke at some point later to a cold chamber and no sign of Challenger. I found him sitting out on the ledge, smoking. The wind had died to a breeze and the snow had stopped. The skies were partially clear, allowing moonlight to wash over the Highlands, shimmering in distant lochs and sending cloud-shadow scurrying over moorland.

  Challenger shushed me before I could speak.

  “Just listen,” he said.

  At first there was only the breeze. Then I heard it, a high wailing song as if two voices were raised in unison. It came from high on the hill above us.

  It sounded like angels singing.

  There is little left to tell. We made our descent early, carefully picking our way down slopes made slippery with already melting snow.

  I only looked back once, as a beam of morning sunlight pierced the gloom. I turned away to shield my eyes and saw our shadows, cast high against the low cloud.

  I raised a hand.

  The auld gray man of Bienn Mac Dhuie raised his in farewell.

  The Ape-Man

  It became apparent to me by the end of 1913 that I had acquired somewhat of a reputation in the newsroom as the person who would be handed the more outlandish stories to chase up. I blamed it on my association with Challenger, given his reputation in the general populace. But in all truth I did not particularly mind, as it got me out of the office on a regular basis, and often allowed me to indulge in some of my recurrent fantasies of adventure and derring-do.

  So when McGuire called me into his offic
e in late November of that year, I went feeling a sense of anticipation at what might lie ahead. I was not to be disappointed.

  “An ape-man?” I said, and laughed. “Somebody has spotted Mowgli?”

  McGuire did not share my mirth. “No. More like those things you and Challenger say you saw in the Amazon. You know what I mean: primitive types with lots of hair? There have been a number of sightings. Whether it’s just one or whether it’s a group, I have no idea, but they’re seeing something, that’s for sure. Head out to Chislehurst and have a look, will you?”

  “Chislehurst? What in blazes would an ape-man be doing in Chislehurst, of all places?”

  This time McGuire did laugh. “If I knew that, I wouldn’t have to send you, would I? And see if your pal Challenger fancies joining you. He’s always good for a quote. He might be as mad as a bag of badgers, but having the old coot on the front page sells papers, I’ll give him that.”

  A little over an hour later I sat in a train leaving Waterloo Station for Kent. Challenger sat opposite me. It being only mid-day during the week, we had the carriage to ourselves. We lit up smokes, and the Professor started probing for more information.

  “There’s little more to tell, old chap,” I said. “Several of the village’s residents have reported seeing an ape, a hairy man, in the vicinity of the village green. And before you ask, there have been no circus visits, no traveling shows, and no animal has been reported missing from any of the zoos across the country.”

  I prided myself on being able to second-guess most questions and had made sure before departure that I had all the available facts on hand, but Challenger’s next question threw me sideways.

  “Tell me, Malone?” he asked. “Is there any construction work going on in the vicinity of the caves?”

  All I knew of the Chislehurst caves was that they were caves, in Chislehurst. And Challenger point-blank refused to enlighten me any further.

  “I shall say no more,” he said, and sat back in his seat, puffing contentedly on a most noxious black Russian cheroot. “We don’t have enough data to form a hypothesis at this stage. Let’s wait until we see the lie of the land.”

  We contented ourselves with small talk, mostly about rugger, and passed a pleasant journey in the cozy carriage. That was to be the end of comfort for a while, as we arrived in Chislehurst under steady drizzle that turned to rain as we walked up the hill away from the railway station. I did not protest when Challenger suggested taking some respite in the Black Bull for a spot of lunch and a beer; the inn had been on my list of places to visit in any case, having been the source of two of the stories McGuire had related to me.

  The large bar was quiet and almost empty, but the barman seemed keen enough to talk. He poured our beer, fetched two large portions of a still-warm pork pie, and did not move away.

  I took some money from my wallet and laid it on the bar, just out of his reach. “Malone, from The Express,” I said. “How would you like to be on the front page of tomorrow’s paper?”

  Challenger, to his credit, managed to hold off from interrupting me unduly as I set to trying to uncover the story of the “ape-man.”

  We left the bar an hour later. The barman had a new half-crown in his pocket, we had eaten an excellent lunch, drunk some fine beer … and learned the address of the first man to see the ape-man. What with that, and the fact that the rain had now stopped, I was feeling rather pleased with the world at that point.

  “You’ll find the vicar at the manse,” the barman had said. “It’s early enough yet that you’ll still get some sense out of him.”

  We discovered what had been meant by that remark when we were shown in to the front parlor of the large house on the edge of the local cemetery.

  “Sherry?” the vicar asked. Without waiting for a reply, he poured a large glass each for Challenger and myself. The vicar’s own tipple came from the whisky bottle that sat on the occasional table beside a well-loved armchair. He was a small, unprepossessing man, with the reddest nose I have ever seen and the trembling hands of a hardened drinker. He perched on the edge of his seat like a sparrow ready to take flight at the slightest provocation, and when I mentioned the ape-man he made a grab for the whisky bottle, as if afraid it might be taken from him.

  “I thought it was a ghost at first,” he whispered. “I’ve seen them before, you know, out in the cemetery. But that was before we had the old oak taken down. It’s been quiet since then.…” He stopped and gulped down some Scotch before continuing. “It was last Friday night. I had just locked up the church, turned back to the path, and there it—he—was. At first I thought it was a beggar …we get a lot of men of the road passing through here … but he sniffed at me in a most peculiar manner, and let out a snuffling grunt that sounded more like something I’d expect from a hog. I stepped forward, offering a hand of kindness. At that, the newcomer moved toward me, for the first time coming completely out of the shadows.”

  The old man stopped and finished off his Scotch, immediately pouring another.

  “Was it an ape?” Challenger asked.

  “I thought so, at first,” the vicar replied. He gazed past my left shoulder, eyes unfocused, remembering. “But it stood up straight, like a man. Its face was completely covered in thick black hair, and was strangely flat around the brow and nose. And the teeth were larger than I would expect on a man. His hands were likewise covered in matted hair, although the palms were white, if somewhat leathery.

  “And that is all I can tell you. He was real, I know that much, for he turned and ran from me, leaving distinct footprints in the gravel of the path that leads up to the church.”

  That was indeed all he could tell us, despite some prodding from me. I could also see that, given the amount of whisky he was draining, it would not be too long before we would get nothing sensible at all from him. Challenger had seen the same thing, and surprised me again with a last question.

  “Tell me, vicar,” he said. “Are there any entrances to the caves around here?”

  “Why, yes,” the old man replied. “Indeed, the church is built on top of them. Plays havoc with the foundations.”

  We left the old man to his liquor and made directly for the church that sat at the far side of the cemetery from the manse. The short walk gave me a chance to quiz Challenger.

  “Why the sudden obsession with these caves, old man?” I said. Despite the fact that I was taller, with significant advantage in length of leg, I struggled to keep up with the Professor as he strode quickly along the path. I knew the signs all too well. He had the scent of exploration in his nostrils, and little would stop him now short of a brick wall in his path. And even then, my money would still be on Challenger.

  “It may be nothing,” he said. “But there is usually a correlation between apes and caves, is there not? Remember the plateau?”

  I remember it all too well. I was only too aware of just how close to death Challenger had come at the hands of those apes. I had no desire to meet another of their kind, certainly not here in the heart of civilization.

  Challenger didn’t wait for an answer. “I have been seeing a pattern recently,” he said. “Many old stories are coming back round again in new forms, what with Mr. Wells and his Morlocks, Kipling and his jungle boy. And I understand there is some kind of apeman causing quite a sensation over in the U.S.A. just this year. People are starting to yearn for a return to the primitive—perhaps even the savage. Something is afoot, you mark my words. And I mean to get to the bottom of it.”

  I had no time to ask anything else, as we had arrived at the church. The vicar had told us of an entrance to the underground cave system at the rear of the building, and we found it quickly enough. A stout door opened to reveal a set of stone steps leading down into darkness. It was obvious that it was, at least occasionally, in use, for there was an oil lamp hanging on a hook near the entrance. I lit it up and carried it in front of me as we began on our way down, taking it slowly in case of accident.

  “St
rictly speaking, these aren’t caves at all, of course,” Challenger said as we came to the foot of the steps and the path leveled out. Passages ran off in three directions from the chamber in which we had arrived. “These chalk and flint mines run for about twenty miles in total under here. Remarkable engineering work, considering it was mostly done in the early medieval period.”

  His voice echoed and if anything, boomed even louder than was normal, here in the confined space. And as if in answer came the thud of feet on hard ground from nearby.

  “After him, Malone,” Challenger shouted, and we headed off at a run, following the rapidly receding footsteps down into the leftmost side chamber. The pursuit came to a quick halt when the passageway opened out into another hall, this one with five exits. We stopped, but I heard nothing but our own breathing.

  “We can’t go chasing around down here, Challenger,” I said. “It’s a labyrinth.”

  He reluctantly agreed. “Then we shall return later with a ball of string,” he said. “But think on it, Malone. What if there really is a relict hominid down here? Think of the implications for science.”

  I was thinking more on the implications for my nervous disposition. I was about to mention that when a low growl echoed around us. Challenger turned toward the apparent source of the sound, just in time to face a head-on attack. It came fast, hunched low, moving in much the same way as I had seen the apes of the plateau employ, a rolling, fast gait. I only had time to register the fact it had blue eyes and a barrel chest almost a match for Challenger’s own, before the two of them were locked in a grappling match.

  The beast growled and grunted, and Challenger yelled back at it, bawling a cry of defiance at point-blank range. He pushed the thing away from him, sending it stumbling against a wall. He spun on his heel and, as the ape launched itself into another attack, landed a perfect right hook on the side of its face. It fell away with a whimper. The blow might have broken the neck of a normal man, but only a second later the ape had turned and come forward once more. Challenger raised his hands, ready to defend himself again, when a shot rang out, almost deafening. A chip of stone flew near the ape’s left foot. The beast turned and fled, gone as quickly as it had come.