Time's Lair
Mike Adamson
Mike Adamson holds a Doctoral degree from Flinders University of South Australia. After early aspirations in art and writing, Mike returned to study and secured qualifications in marine biology and archaeology. Mike was a university educator from 2006 to 2018, is a passionate photographer, master-level hobbyist and a journalist for international magazines.
Screaming was the last thing Dr Jack Hollis, expedition leader to this remote Andean precipice, had ever expected to hear, and it chilled him to the marrow.
The awful sound rasped over the speakers from the com tent, and Hollis came at a run, swiped back the flap and took in the wide-eyed shock of Maisy, the com officer. He grabbed the microphone and keyed to send. “Marquand, Jenner, do you read? Sound off!” When he unkeyed the line was dead and no repetition could coax a response. He glanced down at the girl and she shook her brassy curls.
“You need to see this,” she whispered, fingers flying over her keyboard, to rewind the recording transmitted from the team’s cam. The vast cavern they had penetrated was in deep gloom as the noon hour left the chasm at their backs, and their lights splashed a small area, barely enough to make out detail. But when Maisy played back the last footage before the cam had been knocked from its stand, Hollis saw something streak across the foot of the frame. A dark shape moved like lightning—too fast to register as more than a blur no matter how Maisy cleaned up the image. Now the cam showed only darkness, and a strange static-like rustling and tapping on its sound channel.
Hollis patted her shoulder and stepped out, passed a hand over his broad, craggy features and ran it back through his dark but thinning hair. Then he cupped it to his lips and bellowed. “I’m going down to the aquifer, I want a volunteer to go with me!” Without waiting, he ducked into his tent, in the line of bright shelters that strained and tugged at their tie-downs in the sharp mountain wind, and grabbed his climbing harness and gear.
Surveyors in the raw Southern Andes of the Argentine-Chile border region had found the cave system, revealing a mineralogical paradise, and geologic exploration had been continuing for some time. Hollis had brought an international expedition from a dozen New World universities, and the South American representatives had taken the honor of being the first to set foot in a new chain of caves, first located by drone flights through a deep cleft in the mountains. Professors Marquand from Santiago and Jenner from Brasilia had rappelled the 800 meters into the chasm as late morning flooded it with direct light, and reported back a wonder of stalactites and exuberant growth surrounding a waterfall where an aquifer poured free into the chasm, cascading on to unknown depths. Now their direct radio contact was broken and the circumstances were more than troubling.
Hollis, tough, fifty, a scientist who had worked in Antarctica and the Himalayas, was into his harness and helmet in moments, working swiftly but methodically under the burning blue Andean sky. The high crag from which they descended seemed lifted into the very heavens, surrounded with white slopes, and expedition flags crackled at their masts in the stiff breeze. He was swiftly joined by Danielle Chenault, a tall, wiry grad student from Paris, and they cross-checked each other’s rig with quiet professionalism. When they were ready, they hooked on to the twin main hoist lines, where a powerful electric winch extended over the precipice at a prefab jib. Their eyes met for a moment, and Hollis showed his companion a small automatic pistol with silencer, then stuffed it back into his jacket. “Who knows what it was on the recording?” he said softly, then with a check of the time, they nodded to the worried faces of the team clustered around them, and kicked off into abyssal space.
The chasm was an ax-stroke through the endless volcanic peaks, a split in the Earth thrown up by quakes long ago, but now stable over millions of years. The cave systems were likely extinct magma ducts, but provided a strange new habitat for all forms of life that could find a way in. Fresh water, safety from predators—wind-blown seeds had launched an ecosystem and birdlife was exuberant, gathering in wheeling flocks in the chasm at some times of day.
What could possibly have taken two alert explorers unawares?
As they went rapidly down the cable, the rock walls blurred by, changing in character the deeper they went. After four long jumps they were moving in cool blue shade down sheer, ice-fractured rock, worn by water over long ages. Deeper, deeper, they left behind the world they had always known, entering a place where nature ruled supreme, inscrutable and ominous, and still they plunged on further and further. Red marker flags fluttered below in the ephemeral winds that swirled in the chasm, and they made out the cry of birds objecting to human intrusion.
Soon they passed by flocks of Chilean gulls that had found a home far from the sea, fishing in the long, narrow, sky-blue and ice-cold lake below, created by the cataract that poured from the open fissure of the caves where the aquifer gave forth. The explorers slowed their descent, lines burred through their tough gloves more slowly and they shortened their jumps as the flags came racing up in the shadows. In moments they held fast, hanging off the mouth of a tremendous horizontal fracture in the roots of the mountains, like a gaping maw from which the waters hurled.
“At the entrance,” Hollis reported on the open channel. “Going in now.”
They set the lines in motion, swung a wide arc and dropped the last meter to the rock floor of the cavern, then unhitched the karabiners from the lines. They eyed each other with apprehension and Hollis tapped the mic by his lips. “In and safe. Following the guideline.”
The missing professors had left a relay transponder to bounce their signals back to camp, and a yellow nylon line reached into the gloom, looped to pitons hammered into the rock. Hollis and Chenault, following the guide, were in awe of the mineralogical fantasia before them as they crept between organically developed stalactites and stalagmites that betrayed this as porous rock whose waters filtered through a bed of uplifted sedimentary rock, a captured folding of the South American plate. These were volcanic mountains, the Andes were the back-arc volcanoes of the Peru-Chile Trench, a zone of active subduction, and the sedimentary wedge was captured amongst the igneous andesite which formed the core of the mountains.
But the life that bloomed here, in the fresh water and transient light of the chasm, they realized, was nothing short of remarkable. Ferns and other forest floor low-light vegetation proliferated in a thin soil created from the rotted fronds of a million generations, algae coated rocks black and slimy, and white fish moved in the deep pools of the outflow. Bird and bat guano made white domes on shoulders of rock and in the outer part of the cave old nesting materials were ankle-deep in places.
Abruptly Hollis paused, knelt and brought out a phone to take flash-shots. “I don’t believe it,” he murmured, focusing on a small plant with oblate, shield-like leaves. “This is ancient Gondwana vegetation--Glossopteris—but it’s alive! This species is only known from fossils, and pretty old ones at that.” With hearts in their mouths they crept on through the gathering gloom, switched on the lamps attached to their harnesses, and Hollis switched phone for pistol. The slide was obtrusively loud in the cavern, where the only sound was the murmur of the waters flowing by in their deep, wide bed, and it seemed they moved through the very guts of the Earth, until at last they made out the glimmer of lights—those set up by Marquand and Jenner.
And here the cave felt odd. Some shadow crept at the edges of their souls and thoughts, they felt watched—by something innately hungering. Under this oppressive sensation they forced themselves on, found their way over hummock and slope to the gloomy and vaulted chamber where death had found their companions.
Two sad, hunched shapes lay contorted in their final agonies in the midst of a stalactite field, but little else could be recognized in the confused shadows of the still-burning lamps. Hollis coughed and looked away, fighting to deal with what he saw. Tough clothing was shredded and dragged aside, and the bodies were...gnawed. To the bone. White showed through the shocking redness in a dozen places, and.... It seemed they moved. Certainly, in the sharp brilliance and harsh contrast of the lights ahead, the bodies writhed slowly, a horrific parody of life. Surely, they could not still draw breath, not so grievously injured....
Skittering. Hissing. Sparks in the darkness flashed off and on as one pair of eyes after another swiveled to the newcomers. Hollis shone his flashlight and the pool of blue-white ranged across the butcher’s yard scene, yet it was less the horror of the bodies that struck the pair speechless as that which consumed them.
For long moments they made out nothing recognizable, then something leaped onto a low boulder closer at hand and their eyes widened. It was perhaps 30cm long, pale in color, a reptile with a quite large head, and piercing eyes that searched with direct, unnerving attention. The body was coarsely scaled, with interlocking rows of dermal scutes along the spine, but the aspect which struck the scientists speechless was that it went upon two legs.
The forelimbs were held clear of the rock; a tail jutted stiffly behind for balance, and the small, nimble predator moved with breathtaking speed. Another joined it, and a third, then they realized the bodies did not move, merely the swarm of reptiles which covered them, gorging steadily upon hot human flesh.
“Gracilisuchus,” Hollis whispered, naming the tiny, aberrant crocodilomorph from the Triassic strata of Argentina, and the word seemed to break the spell of the moment, for every eye turned to them, shining in their lights. A horrific hissing broke through the cave as the reptiles abandoned the nearly-devoured kills and came for the new prey.
Convulsively, Hollis and Chenault turned to run, and cleared rocks in full stride, breath catching in their throats as they heard the scuffle and scratch of hundreds of tiny, flying feet behind them, and the hiss of reptilian excitement. Now the massively-rooted organic forms of the stalagmites were a nightmare of obstruction, the algae-slimed rocks a promise of falls which could end only in a swift and terrible death, and they kept their footing with superhuman effort as they raced back toward welcome illumination at the cave mouth.
Closer, closer: they stayed ahead of the hungering horde, breath catching in their throats, and Hollis chanced a few pistol shots back into the gloom, heard squeals and a sudden commotion as if these creatures, in their extreme environment, were cannibals, and some abandoned the chase to consume their fallen fellows.
They heard calls from the surface but had no breath with which to reply, and when the blue daylight of the chasm was before them they knew they had one chance only. Their leap to the dangling lines from above took them far out over the sickening drop to the icy waters. Upon the brink the tiny suchids skated to a halt, one or two going over in their eagerness and vanishing in the spray of the falls. The pack pranced, snapping their jaws as the climbers swung back toward them.
Hollis got his feet to a tall boulder and alighted just above the reptiles’ jumping range, hurriedly transferred his karabiner to the lifting loop of his descent line, and caught Chenault on the next rebound and swing, hauling her onto the rock to do likewise. Above the chittering, slavering pack, the team leader could only tap his headset contact and say simply, “bring us up.” But he had the presence of mind to drag out his phone and snap one evidential frame of the creatures, before the winch, far above, slammed into recovery, their feet left the rock and they swung wide over the frenzied hunters.
They sailed up away from the cave mouth and their hearts banged painfully behind their ribs. Their eyes met as they panted in the knowledge they would live, but that the lives lost were a terrible price to pay, to encounter living fossils which had become the apex predators of their closed and primordial world.
The awful sound rasped over the speakers from the com tent, and Hollis came at a run, swiped back the flap and took in the wide-eyed shock of Maisy, the com officer. He grabbed the microphone and keyed to send. “Marquand, Jenner, do you read? Sound off!” When he unkeyed the line was dead and no repetition could coax a response. He glanced down at the girl and she shook her brassy curls.
“You need to see this,” she whispered, fingers flying over her keyboard, to rewind the recording transmitted from the team’s cam. The vast cavern they had penetrated was in deep gloom as the noon hour left the chasm at their backs, and their lights splashed a small area, barely enough to make out detail. But when Maisy played back the last footage before the cam had been knocked from its stand, Hollis saw something streak across the foot of the frame. A dark shape moved like lightning—too fast to register as more than a blur no matter how Maisy cleaned up the image. Now the cam showed only darkness, and a strange static-like rustling and tapping on its sound channel.
Hollis patted her shoulder and stepped out, passed a hand over his broad, craggy features and ran it back through his dark but thinning hair. Then he cupped it to his lips and bellowed. “I’m going down to the aquifer, I want a volunteer to go with me!” Without waiting, he ducked into his tent, in the line of bright shelters that strained and tugged at their tie-downs in the sharp mountain wind, and grabbed his climbing harness and gear.
Surveyors in the raw Southern Andes of the Argentine-Chile border region had found the cave system, revealing a mineralogical paradise, and geologic exploration had been continuing for some time. Hollis had brought an international expedition from a dozen New World universities, and the South American representatives had taken the honor of being the first to set foot in a new chain of caves, first located by drone flights through a deep cleft in the mountains. Professors Marquand from Santiago and Jenner from Brasilia had rappelled the 800 meters into the chasm as late morning flooded it with direct light, and reported back a wonder of stalactites and exuberant growth surrounding a waterfall where an aquifer poured free into the chasm, cascading on to unknown depths. Now their direct radio contact was broken and the circumstances were more than troubling.
Hollis, tough, fifty, a scientist who had worked in Antarctica and the Himalayas, was into his harness and helmet in moments, working swiftly but methodically under the burning blue Andean sky. The high crag from which they descended seemed lifted into the very heavens, surrounded with white slopes, and expedition flags crackled at their masts in the stiff breeze. He was swiftly joined by Danielle Chenault, a tall, wiry grad student from Paris, and they cross-checked each other’s rig with quiet professionalism. When they were ready, they hooked on to the twin main hoist lines, where a powerful electric winch extended over the precipice at a prefab jib. Their eyes met for a moment, and Hollis showed his companion a small automatic pistol with silencer, then stuffed it back into his jacket. “Who knows what it was on the recording?” he said softly, then with a check of the time, they nodded to the worried faces of the team clustered around them, and kicked off into abyssal space.
The chasm was an ax-stroke through the endless volcanic peaks, a split in the Earth thrown up by quakes long ago, but now stable over millions of years. The cave systems were likely extinct magma ducts, but provided a strange new habitat for all forms of life that could find a way in. Fresh water, safety from predators—wind-blown seeds had launched an ecosystem and birdlife was exuberant, gathering in wheeling flocks in the chasm at some times of day.
What could possibly have taken two alert explorers unawares?
As they went rapidly down the cable, the rock walls blurred by, changing in character the deeper they went. After four long jumps they were moving in cool blue shade down sheer, ice-fractured rock, worn by water over long ages. Deeper, deeper, they left behind the world they had always known, entering a place where nature ruled supreme, inscrutable and ominous, and still they plunged on further and further. Red marker flags fluttered below in the ephemeral winds that swirled in the chasm, and they made out the cry of birds objecting to human intrusion.
Soon they passed by flocks of Chilean gulls that had found a home far from the sea, fishing in the long, narrow, sky-blue and ice-cold lake below, created by the cataract that poured from the open fissure of the caves where the aquifer gave forth. The explorers slowed their descent, lines burred through their tough gloves more slowly and they shortened their jumps as the flags came racing up in the shadows. In moments they held fast, hanging off the mouth of a tremendous horizontal fracture in the roots of the mountains, like a gaping maw from which the waters hurled.
“At the entrance,” Hollis reported on the open channel. “Going in now.”
They set the lines in motion, swung a wide arc and dropped the last meter to the rock floor of the cavern, then unhitched the karabiners from the lines. They eyed each other with apprehension and Hollis tapped the mic by his lips. “In and safe. Following the guideline.”
The missing professors had left a relay transponder to bounce their signals back to camp, and a yellow nylon line reached into the gloom, looped to pitons hammered into the rock. Hollis and Chenault, following the guide, were in awe of the mineralogical fantasia before them as they crept between organically developed stalactites and stalagmites that betrayed this as porous rock whose waters filtered through a bed of uplifted sedimentary rock, a captured folding of the South American plate. These were volcanic mountains, the Andes were the back-arc volcanoes of the Peru-Chile Trench, a zone of active subduction, and the sedimentary wedge was captured amongst the igneous andesite which formed the core of the mountains.
But the life that bloomed here, in the fresh water and transient light of the chasm, they realized, was nothing short of remarkable. Ferns and other forest floor low-light vegetation proliferated in a thin soil created from the rotted fronds of a million generations, algae coated rocks black and slimy, and white fish moved in the deep pools of the outflow. Bird and bat guano made white domes on shoulders of rock and in the outer part of the cave old nesting materials were ankle-deep in places.
Abruptly Hollis paused, knelt and brought out a phone to take flash-shots. “I don’t believe it,” he murmured, focusing on a small plant with oblate, shield-like leaves. “This is ancient Gondwana vegetation--Glossopteris—but it’s alive! This species is only known from fossils, and pretty old ones at that.” With hearts in their mouths they crept on through the gathering gloom, switched on the lamps attached to their harnesses, and Hollis switched phone for pistol. The slide was obtrusively loud in the cavern, where the only sound was the murmur of the waters flowing by in their deep, wide bed, and it seemed they moved through the very guts of the Earth, until at last they made out the glimmer of lights—those set up by Marquand and Jenner.
And here the cave felt odd. Some shadow crept at the edges of their souls and thoughts, they felt watched—by something innately hungering. Under this oppressive sensation they forced themselves on, found their way over hummock and slope to the gloomy and vaulted chamber where death had found their companions.
Two sad, hunched shapes lay contorted in their final agonies in the midst of a stalactite field, but little else could be recognized in the confused shadows of the still-burning lamps. Hollis coughed and looked away, fighting to deal with what he saw. Tough clothing was shredded and dragged aside, and the bodies were...gnawed. To the bone. White showed through the shocking redness in a dozen places, and.... It seemed they moved. Certainly, in the sharp brilliance and harsh contrast of the lights ahead, the bodies writhed slowly, a horrific parody of life. Surely, they could not still draw breath, not so grievously injured....
Skittering. Hissing. Sparks in the darkness flashed off and on as one pair of eyes after another swiveled to the newcomers. Hollis shone his flashlight and the pool of blue-white ranged across the butcher’s yard scene, yet it was less the horror of the bodies that struck the pair speechless as that which consumed them.
For long moments they made out nothing recognizable, then something leaped onto a low boulder closer at hand and their eyes widened. It was perhaps 30cm long, pale in color, a reptile with a quite large head, and piercing eyes that searched with direct, unnerving attention. The body was coarsely scaled, with interlocking rows of dermal scutes along the spine, but the aspect which struck the scientists speechless was that it went upon two legs.
The forelimbs were held clear of the rock; a tail jutted stiffly behind for balance, and the small, nimble predator moved with breathtaking speed. Another joined it, and a third, then they realized the bodies did not move, merely the swarm of reptiles which covered them, gorging steadily upon hot human flesh.
“Gracilisuchus,” Hollis whispered, naming the tiny, aberrant crocodilomorph from the Triassic strata of Argentina, and the word seemed to break the spell of the moment, for every eye turned to them, shining in their lights. A horrific hissing broke through the cave as the reptiles abandoned the nearly-devoured kills and came for the new prey.
Convulsively, Hollis and Chenault turned to run, and cleared rocks in full stride, breath catching in their throats as they heard the scuffle and scratch of hundreds of tiny, flying feet behind them, and the hiss of reptilian excitement. Now the massively-rooted organic forms of the stalagmites were a nightmare of obstruction, the algae-slimed rocks a promise of falls which could end only in a swift and terrible death, and they kept their footing with superhuman effort as they raced back toward welcome illumination at the cave mouth.
Closer, closer: they stayed ahead of the hungering horde, breath catching in their throats, and Hollis chanced a few pistol shots back into the gloom, heard squeals and a sudden commotion as if these creatures, in their extreme environment, were cannibals, and some abandoned the chase to consume their fallen fellows.
They heard calls from the surface but had no breath with which to reply, and when the blue daylight of the chasm was before them they knew they had one chance only. Their leap to the dangling lines from above took them far out over the sickening drop to the icy waters. Upon the brink the tiny suchids skated to a halt, one or two going over in their eagerness and vanishing in the spray of the falls. The pack pranced, snapping their jaws as the climbers swung back toward them.
Hollis got his feet to a tall boulder and alighted just above the reptiles’ jumping range, hurriedly transferred his karabiner to the lifting loop of his descent line, and caught Chenault on the next rebound and swing, hauling her onto the rock to do likewise. Above the chittering, slavering pack, the team leader could only tap his headset contact and say simply, “bring us up.” But he had the presence of mind to drag out his phone and snap one evidential frame of the creatures, before the winch, far above, slammed into recovery, their feet left the rock and they swung wide over the frenzied hunters.
They sailed up away from the cave mouth and their hearts banged painfully behind their ribs. Their eyes met as they panted in the knowledge they would live, but that the lives lost were a terrible price to pay, to encounter living fossils which had become the apex predators of their closed and primordial world.