David Golemon - Primeval

"Boy, I got a mission for you."

"Huh?" Charlie said as he found himself staring at the collected pieces of lost humanity lying on the cave's floor.

"If you do it, you'll never want for anything ever again; all I want you to do is take this" — he held up the journal—"and mail it to my father in Boston. He'll know what to do. I've written instructions on the last page by the written map. That will give me the Providence I need. He'll get my lawyers to get the claim filed in Ottawa. I have written my account of finding the cave and doubled the description of this area." Again he looked around wildly. Then he reached out and handed Charlie ten golden double eagles. "I think that will cover the postage," he said as he started to laugh crazily.

Ellenshaw shook his head as he gained his feet. He knew then that the years of loneliness and failure had driven the old man insane, maybe even murderously so.

"I'm going to stay here and get the gold ready to move out, I'll hire some of the locals to help me get it downriver. First, I have to make sure they don't know what it is they're moving."

"Don't be crazy, Mr. Lattimer. Come back now; don't stay here alone," Charlie said as he looked around the cave nervously. "I don't know what's out there, at least I'm not a hundred percent sure, but I don't think they like us being here."

"Son, superstitions don't scare me. I've heard the stories these Indians talk about, they're made to keep the young ones in line and out of the woods at night. Now, you go and take this with you. You kids can find your way back easily enough." Lattimer pressed the journal into Charlie's hands and then his face became a mask of menace. "And you will take care not to spread the word about my find, right, boy?"

Ellenshaw didn't answer. He clutched the old journal in his hands and was sure Lattimer would just as easily murder him right there if he failed to give him the answer he wanted to hear.

"Yes, sir, I'll tell no one, and I'll mail the journal to your father."

The excited glee came magically back into Lattimer's facial features. He smiled and slapped Ellenshaw on the back.

"Good luck, son. Get across the river as quick as you can and put some space between you and the north shore, understand?"

Charlie didn't say anything, he just turned and walked as quickly as he could through the darkness, shoving the journal into his shirt as he moved while hoping beyond hope that there wasn't anything out of legend waiting for him outside.

Lattimer looked at the stacked bags of golden double eagles. The American currency would not be hard to pass off without garnering too much attention. He would claim to be an investor in gold and that he had bought up the double eagles years before. He shook his head and then ran his hand over his beard.

He had made several torches and slipped them inside cracks in the cave walls. The flickering light showed the paintings that had captured the attention of that kid, Ellenshaw, and for the first time Lattimer studied them. When he stood and took one of the torches from the wall, he held it to the last of the cave paintings and examined it. As he brought the fire closer to the large slothlike beast, he froze. The grunt was a deep-seeded hollow sound and it had come from behind him. He froze and then closed his eyes as a wild, pungent smell assaulted his nostrils.

When a loud scraping sound struck his ears, he turned in the direction of the cave's opening just as the light from the day was shut out. Someone or something had covered the cave opening. As he started to move toward the front of the cave, he heard the sound of his treasure as the coins slowly slid from one of the many bags. Something behind him had upended one of the sacks and was pouring its contents onto the ground.

He swung the torch toward where he had stacked the thousand bags of double eagles and saw the owner of the many sounds he had heard through the many strange nights in the woods lining the Stikine. The beast was well over ten feet in height and stood with its powerful arms at its sides. As Lattimer watched the empty sack fall from the beast's enormous hand, he saw that the eyes were fixed on him — the yellow glow of the eyes shone brightly in the torchlight and they seemed intelligent. The deep seated orbs moved only slightly when Lattimer brought the flame of the torch higher so he could see more clearly.

"You leave my gold be," Lattimer said beneath his breath, the insanity of his own words making his eyes go wide. He wasn't seeing a magnificent beast standing before him, he was seeing only a thief of a lifetime find.

The great ape grunted and took a step toward Lattimer. The large left arm raised, it was as if the animal was offering something to Lattimer, but the old prospector refused to give the thief any benefit of the doubt. He swung the torch at the large creature and struck its massive hand, making the animal roar in anger. The large muzzle rose into the air and the cave shook with the powerful, voiced exclamation of pain and rage.

Suddenly, before Lattimer knew what was happening, several more of the giant animals appeared in back of the first, and that was when the old man's mind finally snapped. He screamed and went wading into the beasts of that long-told legend, an animal that supposedly died out tens of thousands of years before that summer of 1968. The animals closed in on L. T. Lattimer and soon after, the secret of the Stikine would be left for others to uncover.

They Who Follow waited for mankind to return to the lost valley that had been their home for twenty thousand years.

The graduate students had been frightened when they hadn't seen or heard from Charlie Ellenshaw until he stumbled into their camp in the late afternoon. As much as they questioned him on where he had been, the more Charlie clammed up. He sat on the same rock he had the night before and held the old journal in his hands. He had wrapped it in a handkerchief and wouldn't let anyone near it.

When the others started packing for their return trip downriver, Charlie reluctantly started to help. His silence unnerved the others but they didn't press him as to why Lattimer hadn't rejoined them. Charlie had told them that the old man had continued upriver, searching for his gold.

As the rubber boats shoved away from the shore of the Stikine, all thought of the plane wreckage had escaped Charlie's thoughts; only the vision of the cave's paintings and what they depicted remained. He watched the trees surrounding their camp slide away from view, with only one thought going through his mind: They were watching.

The prestigious one-hundred-year-old Rainier Building had been bought in 1991 and had been completely renovated. The first sixteen floors were quite normal, if expensive, two- and three-bedroom condominiums. The seventeenth and eighteenth floors, however, belonged to just one man, the owner of the property and the person who designed the interior of the building: Valery Serta, the son of a Russian immigrant and heir to the vast fortune left to him upon his father's death in 1962. The family fortune was in the felling of the ancient forests of the great Northwest — forests that filled the pockets of the family Serta since the late twenties and supplied the U.S. markets with rich wood and paper products.

With a twenty-four-hour house staff of twelve, and with a minimum of two on duty at all times, the old man kept them busy with his imperialistic demands. A loner in his old age, the only visitor he took was from his grandson who was now a student at Harvard, and one or two old friends from the logging business. For some reason, that no one who knew him could fathom, Valery Serta never tired of hearing about the destruction of the woods that had covered the area since the dawn of time. He closed his eyes upon hearing the news of another tract of land that had been cleared and raped of the woods that covered it. The enjoyment stemmed from the dark tales his own father had passed onto him, never explaining why the woods and forests of North America held such a bad place in his heart.