Colony by Benjamin Cross (best way to read books .TXT) 📕

Hjalmar Ridge. It’s like a maze down there. If he hasn’t been killed already, then I wouldn’t be surprised if he was still wandering around in the dark.”

There was a brief silence while the interviewer and the interpreter exchanged a few words in Russian. All Callum knew was that they didn’t swear.

Then: “So Mr Peterson alleges that Mr Volkov set him up?”

5 Edinburgh, Scotland

Callum awoke. It was 4:30am. His chest was tight and painful. His sheets were soaked with sweat. He sat up and threw his legs over the side of the bed. With one hand clasping at his chest, he flailed the other around him, scrabbling for a weapon. “There’s something in here.”

“Solnishko, there is nothing,” Darya said. She pulled herself up from where she lay next to him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders. “It is okay. It is just bad dreams again.”

“No, there’s something,” he shouted. His heart was pounding. He could hear the terror in his own voice. “Something…” He pointed to the far side of the room. “Look! In the corner…”

“It is just bad dreams,” she repeated, kissing the back of his neck. “Just bad dreams.”

It was maddening. How could she be so calm? Her voice seemed miles away and her fingers stroking through his hair barely registered.

“But…” He felt the kisses on his nape grow bolder. He focussed on the thing in the corner, draped in shadow. Gradually the face vanished, the eyes shrivelling away until they were nothing but knots in the wood of the wardrobe door.

Breathing heavily, he reached up and placed a hand over Darya’s. She was right. There was nothing with them in the room.

It had been three months since the two of them, and Ava, had at last been released from Russian custody and thrust back into their former lives.

“Anything from Ava?” he asked. The last he’d heard, she had gone back to Alaska where, despite their warnings, she had gone ahead and published a paper on the discovery of the living fossil Troodon Avaleensis. With no hard evidence, it had been unanimously renounced as crackpot by the palaeontological community and had effectively ended her career. Within weeks of returning, she had been forced to accept a face-saving redundancy package from the university. This had included a generous subsidy towards private psychiatric treatment, which all concerned had insisted upon, besides Ava herself. Since then, Callum’s contact with her had dwindled from daily to weekly to now, when he wasn’t certain when, or even if, he would hear from her again.

“Nothing,” Darya replied. “You know that she lives with her brother?”

Callum nodded. “In Toronto.”

“I think that she does not sleep well either.”

He took a deep breath, still trying to shake the nightmare. They were getting worse, more vivid, more intense than ever since he had returned home. It was as if the greater the distance he put between himself and that awful place, the stronger its hold. Harmsworth was stalking him, head bowed, eyes wide, mouth full of razor-sharp memories.

“At least you can run from the real ones,” he whispered.

Darya shifted behind him and began massaging his shoulders. Her hands were soft and he could smell the reassuring warmth of her skin. Of the three of them, she had suffered the worst physically, but she seemed to be dealing with the psychological aftermath well. She had the nightmares too, but then she also had a steadiness about her that Callum had to admire. Credentials intact, she had resigned her post at the Russian Academy in Novosibirsk and been granted a visa endorsed by the Royal Society. She was now living with Callum and working with Scottish Natural Heritage on a pioneering new climate change project.

He would never tell her, but night after night she would slide from his grip. As he hung over the precipice, straining to hold on to her, she would plunge down into the magma. She would stare up at him, her green eyes flashing, screaming as the liquid fire ate into her skin. And when only her head was left, it would twist impossibly on the surface of the molten current, still crying out for help.

Some nights he would fall after her, his stomach turning, clawing at his own face with the pain of her imagined loss. On others, the magma would congeal before him and shatter into a bed of shingle. The disembodied head would become Peterson’s, the harpoon emerging from below his chin. The Texan’s eyes would roll forward in their sockets and he would hold Callum’s gaze. Then his hand would shoot up and close around his throat. Harmsworth is my creation, McJones! You got that? My creation!

“The worst ones aren’t about the creatures,” Callum said.

Her fingers stopped caressing his skin. “Not for me either. I see the people. I see Dan, I see Volkov, I see Starshyna Koikov, I see Lungkaju… all of them, all of their faces…” She paused. “The creatures, they are only background, in the shadows.”

“Behind the faces,” Callum added.

She let out a long sigh. “Perhaps in our stomachs we understand these animals better.”

“Than ourselves?”

“Maybe,” she said. “I look at these creatures and I know why they do what they do to me, but then I look at the people and I am no longer very sure. I think that it is this that is real nightmare for me.”

Callum sat quietly, digesting her words.

At length she pulled him down next to her on the bed and hugged onto him. “You have your interview tomorrow, then we take Jamie to Loch Ness. It is busy day, solnishko, so you should rest while you can.”

Soothed by the sound of her voice, he settled his head back down onto the pillow. The interview was at the Edinburgh University Archaeology Department. It was for a part-time role, which he could tell would be largely administrative. Career-wise, it was a colossal step backwards, especially as Clive had offered to promote him to Jonas’s old position if he’d stayed in Aberdeen. But, if nothing else,