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Take note of the shaman’s rattle and other ritual objects. They seem unique. But the figurine I’ve enclosed, which we found in a deserted hut at this site, is the proof I’ve been looking for. Note the exaggerated claws, the reptilian attributes, the hints at bipedalia. The Kothoga exist, and the Mbwun legend is not mere fabrication.
otherwise they’d never have found the hidden path, slanting down steeply between moss-slick walls. Then, that crude hut, half-buried among ancient trees, in the wet vale where daylight barely penetrated … The two Botocudo guides, normally chattering nonstop to each other in Tupian, shut up immediately. When questioned by Carlos, one of them just muttered something about a guardian of the hut, and a curse on anybody who violated its secrets. Then, for the first time, Whittlesey had heard them speak the word Kothoga. Kothoga. The shadow people.
Whittlesey saw the figurine sitting on a tall earthen mound in the middle of the hut. Around its base lay a number of strangely carved discs. Then the flashlight reached the walls. The hut had been lined with human skulls. Examining a few of the closest, Whittlesey noticed deep scratch marks he could not immediately understand. Ragged holes yawned through the tops.
he saw dim light filtering through thousands of eye sockets, dust motes swimming sluggishly in the heavy air.
Whittlesey stared at the shock of snow-white hair plastered to Carlos’s sweaty forehead. That hair had been pure black yesterday, before Carlos looked into the hut.
For the last several miles, he had been following an ancient trail of unknown origin, barely a narrow alley in the brush. The trail cleverly worked its way through the blackwater swamps surrounding the base of the tepui, the soggy, jungle-clotted plateau that lay ahead. The trail had the logic of a human trail, Whittlesey thought. It moved with obvious purpose; animal tracks often wandered.
Besides the hut, they’d seen no sign of human habitation for the last several days except a long-deserted root-gatherer village. Only the Kothoga could have created this path.
it was this other creature, Mbwun, to which local myth cycles ascribed all the killing and savagery. Strange—an unknown creature, supposedly controlled by a tribe nobody had seen.
Then he could search for the Kothoga, prove they hadn’t died out centuries before. He’d be famous—the discoverer of an ancient people, living in a kind of Stone Age purity deep in the Amazon, on a plateau that floated above the jungle like Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World.
There, on the opposite side, was the carcass of the animal. The base of the tree it lay against had been ritually carved with a spiral, and a bundle of bright green parrot feathers lay on top of the gaping, greasy brown rib cage. But as he walked closer, he saw that the carcass was wearing a khaki shirt. A cloud of fat flies roared and swarmed about the open rib cage. Whittlesey noticed that a severed left arm was lashed to the tree trunk with a fibrous rope, the palm sliced open. A number of spent cartridge casings lay around the body. Then he saw the head. It lay face up under the corpse’s
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Seemed the crates had come downriver from Pôrto de Mós the previous fall. They’d been scheduled for air shipment to a New York museum, but something had happened to the people who’d made the arrangements—the apprentice couldn’t say exactly what. But payment hadn’t come through in time, and now the crates were snarled in a mass of red tape, seemingly forgotten.
Maybe the dinosaurs were through the next door. But that led only to the boring Hall of Pacific Peoples, full of jades and ivories and silks and bronze statues.
“Morning, Doctor,” he said. He called everyone ‘doctor,’ from graduate students to the Museum Director, whether they owned that title or not.
Jimmy, a guard usually assigned to the Peruvian Gold Hall, was standing in front of the tape with Gregory Kawakita, a young Assistant Curator in the Evolutionary Biology Department. “What’s going on here?” Margo asked. “Typical Museum efficiency,” Kawakita said with a wry smile. “We’ve been locked out.” “Nobody’s told me nothing, except to keep everyone out,” the guard said nervously.
Smithback had been commissioned to write a book about the Museum, focusing on the Superstition exhibition that would open next week. “Unnatural doings at the Natural History Museum,” Smithback muttered darkly in her ear
No, I haven’t seen the bodies.… I don’t know what kind of mutilation there was, if any.… I don’t have the expertise to address that subject, you’ll have to wait for the autopsies.… I want to emphasize that there’s been no official statement made by the police.… Until you stop shouting I won’t answer any more questions.… No, I said we do not have wild animals in the Museum.… Yes, that includes bears.… No, I’m not going to give any names.… How could I possibly answer that question?… This press conference is over.… I said this press conference is over.…
Margo moved deeper into the Museum, away from the public areas, until she reached the corridor called ‘Broadway.’ Stretching the entire length of the Museum—six city blocks—it was said to be the longest single hallway in New York City.
A hundred-gallon fish tank, a simulated swamp belonging to the Animal Behavior Department, perched on an iron frame underneath a battery of lights. It was so overpopulated with algae and weeds that Margo had only rarely been able to catch sight of a fish peering out through the murk.
The conservator, a sour young woman, worked in angry silence, spending what seemed barely three hours each day at her task. Margo figured it took her about two weeks to conserve each mask, judging by the slow turnover. The particular mask collection she was assigned to contained five thousand such masks, but it didn’t seem to concern anyone that, at the rate she was going, the project would take close to two centuries to complete.
She understood how somebody could end up a permanent rider on the government-grant gravy train, or what the scientists derisively referred to as an ABD—All But Dissertation.
Frock started his career as a physical anthropologist. Confined to a wheelchair by childhood polio, he had nonetheless done pioneering fieldwork
Kohler(?) in Angels & Demons
Instead, he postulated that evolution was sometimes much less gradual; he held that short-lived aberrations—“monster species”—were sometimes an offshoot of evolution. Frock argued that evolution wasn’t always caused by random selection, that the environment itself could cause sudden, grotesque changes in a species.
the Callisto Effect, after the Greek myth in which a young woman is suddenly transformed into a wild creature.
Embedded in its flat surface was a deep depression, oddly smudged and elongated along one end with three large indentations at the other. According to Frock, this was a fossil footprint of a creature unknown to science:
“The Ki, as you know”—Frock always assumed his listener was as familiar with a subject as he was—“at one time used the bark of a certain bush as a headache remedy. Charrifère studied them in 1869 and noted their use of this bush in his field journals. When I showed up three quarters of a century later, they had stopped using the remedy. They believed instead that headaches were caused by sorcery.” He shifted in his wheelchair. “The accepted remedy was now for the kinfolk of the headache victim to identify the sorcerer and, naturally, go off and murder him. Of course, the kin of the dead
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Frock remained silent for a moment. “I fear for the Museum,” he said finally. Surprised, Margo said, “They were brothers. It’s a tragedy for the family. But things will die down soon—they always do.” “I think not,” Frock said. “I’ve heard something about the condition of the bodies. The force used was … of a nonnormal nature.”
But you’ve displayed three gifts that are indispensable to a first-class researcher: a sense of what to look for, a sense of where to look for it, and the zeal to see your theories through.”
I hear the cops have even enlisted a special coroner. Someone who reads gaping claw wounds like Helen Keller reads braille.”
“As I was saying,” Smithback continued, ignoring the outburst, “she’s supposedly an expert on big cats. Dr. Matilda Ziewicz. Some name, huh. Sounds fat.” Despite her annoyance, Margo suppressed a smile. Smithback might be a jerk, but at least he was a funny jerk.
Ask any of the security guards. There’s a million square feet in this joint where a big cat or something could be roaming, including five miles of forced-air ducts big enough for a man to crawl around in. And under the Museum is a warren of abandoned tunnels.
The first Museum was built on an artesian swamp that couldn’t be permanently drained. So they built all these tunnels to divert the water. Then, when the original Museum burned down in 1911, they built the present Museum on top of the old Museum’s basement. The subbasement is huge, multileveled … much of it isn’t even electrified.
“And then, there’re the usual rumors about the Museum Beast.” Anybody who worked in the Museum had heard that story. Maintenance men working late-night shifts saw it out of the corners of their eyes. Assistant curators wandering down dimly lit corridors on their way to specimen vaults saw it moving in the shadows. Nobody knew what it was, or where it had come from, but some claimed the beast had killed a man several years before.
Lavinia Rickman, the Chief of Public Relations for the Museum, had hired Smithback to write his book.
“You’ve never seen such a company man in your life.” He looked up, and groaned. “Oh, God, here he comes now.”
Besides, the area around the base of the staircase had been literally bathed in blood; even now, eighteen hours or so after the crime, the smell hung heavily in the air, agitating the hounds.
The hounds had never been trained to work indoors. Naturally, they were confused. But it wasn’t his fault. The police wouldn’t even tell him if they were looking for a human or an animal. Perhaps they didn’t know themselves.
D’Agosta continued to stare at the dog. “Without the dogs, there’s no way of knowing which way it went,” he said at last. “Let’s get the hell out of here and let forensics deal with this mess.”
Even with one million square feet of storage space, every square inch had been utilized, including stairwells, corridors, and the offices of junior curators. Of fifty million artifacts and specimens, only about 5 percent was on exhibition; the rest was available only to scientists and researchers.
“He’s always felt that exhibitions should be more accessible to the general public. People may attend this because they expect ghosts and goblins and a spooky show—and they’ll get them. But they’ll go away with more than you might expect.
Surely you’ve heard the stories of a curse on the figurine, that sort of nonsense?” “Not much,” Margo said. “The expedition that found the Kothoga material met with tragedy,” Moriarty continued, “and nobody’s been near the stuff since. It’s still in the original crates. Just last week, all the crates were taken from the basement area where they’d sat all these years
The skull is empty. The entire brain appears to have fallen out or been extracted through this hole …
“The hypothalamus regulates body temperature, blood pressure, heartbeat, and the metabolism of fats and carbohydrates. Also the sleep-wake cycle. We think it holds the centers of pleasure and pain. It’s a very complicated organ, Lieutenant.” She looked fixedly at him, anticipating a question. D’Agosta mumbled dutifully, “How does it do all that?” “Hormones. It secretes hundreds of regulatory hormones into the brain and bloodstream.”
As he moved into the next hall, he had the unsettling impression—as he had so often—that his echoing footfalls were being carefully duplicated by some unseen presence.
He came to the next station and turned the key. The box clicked, and registered 10:34 P.M. It only took four minutes to get to the next station. That gave him six minutes for a toke.
The last thing he saw were his shadowy entrails rolling and slipping down the stairs. After a moment, he stopped wondering where all that gore had suddenly come from.
“Mr. Smithback, the Gilborg expedition was a grotesque failure. They were looking for an island that did not exist. One of them, as you are so zealous in pointing out, raped a native woman. We were careful to keep all mention of Gilborg out of the exhibition. Now, is it really necessary to document the Museum’s failures?”
“There are certain things we expect, and indeed, that we have a right to expect. They are—” she ticked them off on bony fingers. “One: No controversy. “Two: Nothing that might offend ethnic groups. “Three: Nothing that might harm the Museum’s reputation.
D’Agosta just couldn’t get used to the Hall of the Great Apes. All those big grinning chimps, stuffed, hanging out of the fake trees, with their hairy arms and hilarious realistic dicks and big human hands with real fingernails. He wondered why it had taken so long for scientists to figure out that man was descended from the apes. Should’ve been obvious the first time they clapped eyes on a chimp.
“Excellent.” D’Agosta heard a low, mellifluous voice behind him. “Who the hell are you?” he said, turning to see a tall, slender man, wearing a crisp black suit, leaning against the top of the stairwell. Hair so blond it was almost white was brushed straight back above pale blue eyes. “The undertaker?” “Pendergast,” the man said,
“And I’d like a series from the top of the stairs, and a sequence coming down. Take your time, get a nice play of line, shadow, and light going.” The photographer looked carefully at Pendergast, then moved off.
