Shadow Creatures Read Free Page A

now so sophisticated that they could not only identify a whole range of animate or inanimate things in a single photograph but could
also decide how large or small they were, based on the things that were around them.
    Which is why Tara was now looking at a photograph of a giant rat.
    One of the many images that the search-bot had been looking for was that of a rat – facing left, facing right, dead, alive, it didn’t matter. It was just looking for a rat. That was
one of the search terms that Calum had specified – Tara wasn’t sure why. Having found a rat, the bot would then check its size. If it seemed unusually large, then it would send Tara an
email with a copy of the image. Nine times out of ten the images were of rats in situations where perspective made them look larger than they really were, but, on examining this particular image,
the rat in it was huge. Not elephant-sized, but still pretty impressive: about the size of a fully grown Alsatian, but bulkier. The bot had sent Tara a photograph of a grinning Asian man holding a
turtle. The rat was in a cage in the background. The man gave the rat its scale.
    Tara found that she’d stopped breathing, and took a sudden gulp of air. The rat looked completely ordinary until you realized its unusual size. It was side-on to the camera, and Tara could
clearly see its beady black eye and its blossom-like ear.
    Calum would want to see this. He’d told Tara that there had been intermittent reports from locals in Indonesia of colonies of giant rats living in the jungles, but nobody had ever taken a
photograph or brought a body back for examination. And now here was one, sitting meekly in a cage somewhere.
    Actually, maybe not ‘meekly’. Its mouth was open slightly, and Tara could see the glint of large incisors inside.
    She checked the metadata that the search-bot had thoughtfully included in the email, just in case the image had been taken from a horror movie and was just a rather good special effect rather
than something real. Interestingly, the website from which it had come was part of the ‘shadow’ internet – the massive collection of web pages that deliberately stopped themselves
from being indexed by search engines, keeping themselves hidden so that you actually had to know the web address to find them – or have a set of sophisticated search-bots like Tara did. They
didn’t want to be found by casual browsers because they were either borderline illegal or, frankly,
completely
illegal. This particular website was hosted in China, which was
interesting too. She used her tablet web-browser to navigate to the site, and moved up until she hit the home page.
    She gasped.
    The banner on top of the website proudly proclaimed, in English:
Xi Lang’s Emporium of Unusual Pets!
The main space was taken up by several images of lions, crocodiles, a
sullen-looking gorilla and a really big snake. All were in strangely inappropriate settings like landscaped lawns, outside swimming pools and flagstone patios. A message underneath the photographs
read:
You have a desire for some strange or exotic animal, and we can supply it, direct to your door! Come inside and take a look!
    Interesting. Interesting and rather creepy Tara had known of course that some people with more money than sense kept pets that you wouldn’t or couldn’t fit into a normal house
– Michael Jackson had kept a chimpanzee, for instance – but she had never thought to wonder where they got them. Of course, it made sense that there would be a middleman, a facilitator
who could offer these animals for sale the way a normal pet shop would offer kittens or puppies.
    It was almost certainly illegal. There were international laws against trafficking in endangered or dangerous animals, but that didn’t stop some people from wanting them. They were status
symbols.
    She scanned through several pages, grateful that she had hacked her tablet’s settings so that anyone else – like the owners of