The Weird Company Read Free Page A

peered down into what had until recently been a stygian darkness. The hollow was no more than eight feet deep but extended off in all directions. The roof and floor were abundant with stalactites and stalagmites, some of which met to form the most spectacular of crystalline columns. But most importantly, what set me rushing back to greet Lake’s plane was the vast wash of shells and bones that seemed to cover the entire floor of the cavern.
    It was just after 1400 when we finished securing the winch and our team carefully lowered down into the cavern. Within minutes all of us had realized that we had discovered what was possibly the greatest cache of paleontological samples ever discovered. We quickly identified the most amazing diversity of samples I had ever seen including mollusks, crustaceans, primitive sharks, placoderms, thecodonts, mosasaur skulls, pterodactyls, archeopteryx, primitive horses, and titanotheres. There were however no Pleistocene samples, no mastodons, camels or deer, and thus we concluded that the cavern had not received any new materials for at least thirty million years. There was however a curious abundance of primitive life generally found in the Silurian and the Ordovician, which seemed a tremendous contradiction to the latter more evolved species and the rock in which they were imbedded which was without a doubt Oligocene in origin. The fantastical conclusion that we drew from such information was that in some manner the life of more than three hundred million years ago had continued unabated and uninterrupted, mixing with the species that we knew had come into existence only about fifty million years ago.
    It was at this point that Lake scribbled a hasty note and handed it to Moulton for dispatch over the wireless. The young engineering student had not been gone for more than five minutes before Fowler began calling for Lake and I to come and examine a large section of sandstone. For there in the relatively young sedimentary rock were several distinct triangular striated prints nearly identical to those we had found in the slate samples at other sites. There were some minor differences, the new samples were smaller and the markings bore a slight curvature at the end, Lake postulated that these markings indicated that the species might be undergoing a reversion, returning to a more primitive or decadent form, although I disagreed on drawing such conclusions based on limited data. Regardless I concurred with the note he quickly jotted and handed to Mills suggesting that our discoveries would be as important to biology as Einstein was to physics, as they would seem to indicate a remnant species surviving from a previous cycle of life prior to that currently in dominance perhaps a billion years old.
    Lake had barely finished dispatching another radio message when Atwood brought our attention to several of the large vertebrate fossils, which showed strange wounds. These injuries seemed to fall into two categories, first there were the skulls of which we found more than a dozen, all showing a straight strangely smooth penetrating bore into the brain cavity. The other markings were on the long bones of the legs and consisted of straight lines perpendicular to the bone itself, which effectively bisected the bones in a single cut, though we found several examples in which the final cut was apparently preceded by multiple false starts. Neither Lake nor I could conceive of a predatory species to which we could attribute such marks.
    Another note hastily dispatched, and another call of amazement. One of the men, I cannot remember who, had found a peculiar fragment of green soapstone about six inches across and an inch and a half thick shaped like a five-pointed star. The thing was curiously smooth and the angles were cleaved inwards. Carroll and I brought the thing up and into the light and placed it beneath his magnifying glass and he swore he could make out tiny dots grouped into regular patterns. As he