The Cretaceous Border

Sylvia Kelso

An SF “if” about what you might find right in your own backyard.

“The Cretaceous Border” has just come out in the Susurrus Press anthology Neverlands and Otherwheres, along with 12 other excellent stories.

You might think that a lot of strange things turn up in my backyard, if you didn’t actually live in Ibisville. For the tropics, though, the yard itself is pretty ordinary: picket fence, big hibiscus shrubs, golden-cane and fan palms, banks of military ferns, shade-houses at the back and sides. Spreading over it all, the quandong and fiddlewood and African mahogany trees.

But an ibis comes, of course, one or several, I can never tell, though he or she’s there every year, as soon as it gets dry: striding and jabbing wherever the hoses ran. There are honey-eaters too, three or four sorts, and once a Wompoo pigeon, orange and green and sumptuous purple bosom, a bulky vision in the quandong tree. And a few times, a black-and-yellow treesnake, getting a bit too close to the windows, in pursuit of poorly cached green frogs.

Night-time usually brings possums, thumping and blundering over the roof. In season, flying foxes — outsiders call them fruit-bats  —  flap and squawk in the quandong, dropping little blue spaceball fruits. A mopoke ghosts through occasionally, opening the dark with its hollow, echoing owl cry: Hoo-o-o... hoop! — Hoo-o-o... hoop! And curlews, once or twice. That eerie unexpected chorus, like high-octave banshee screams.

Once, too, a burglar came. Blundering through the backyards after hiding his loot three houses down, hunted by irate citizenry, out with bicycles and cricket bats in the street. I wasn’t quick enough to chase him down my driveway into their arms. Instead he ran up over my tall Ibisville garbage bins, leapt the higher picket fence, and was gone. Vanished into suburban legendry.

But once, as the stories say, upon a time, something else came in, from some next door or other. Though precisely which door it used...

* * *

I did realise, very early in the piece, that it was something new. More night rustles, louder rattles and crackles in the ground-level branches of my town-side lillipilli trees, that I used to call the herbaceous border, before they grew twenty feet high. New vocal effects. Not the ggrrr of possums facing off, or the mopoke, or gecko chitter, or even cricket chirr. High-pitched, spasmodic. Nothing to pin down, just — another voice in the night chorus. Something there.

The first tracks were sunk deep in the lillipilli bed. Very far apart, for their size, long and narrow. Kangaroo rat, I guessed. Or bandicoot. They’re small marsupial hoppers with long narrow toes, and they take broad skittering leaps. And they dig for their food, animal or vegetable, so I thought, it’s very charming to have this memento of the bush in my suburban yard, but next thing they’ll be grubbing up my plants, and probably my fence posts after that. I’ll seriously have to consider trying to keep them out.

Which meant I wasn’t expecting the toad.

I did half-hear one odd noise in the night. It was a cross between a gargle and a squeal, but I wrote it down to yet another skirmishing possum, and didn’t get up. It was 5.30 am before I opened the back door to go running, and it was just outside.

I think it was one of the detested cane-toads. Not a native, pointy-snouted barramundi frog, I hope. It’s rather hard to tell, when the whole thing’s been ripped apart, and legs, head and bits of guts spread all over your concrete path.

Usually I meet my running partner, Cat, out at the front-gate. She came down the drive to see what had kept me, and as she rounded the house corner her eyes got big. “Holy Dooley!” she said. “What did that?”

“I don’t know.” If it wasn’t still just dawn, you might think, a hawk. Now they know to leave the head with its poison glands, cane-toads make a regular meal for the local kites. “Not a... snake, I don’t think.”

“No, a snake would’ve just swallowed it.” We were both sort of stepping back. “Eck — it’s been eaten too.”

At least, part of the guts were gone. I stood there in my running shoes and shorts with the urban half-dark close around me, hearing a magpie start its pre-dawn warm-up, and a sudden, more than squeamish chill raced up the back of my neck.

“Euew,” Cat said. “Maybe it was a rat.”

“Yeah.” Rats are reputed to gnaw concrete if they’re hungry enough. Neither of us said, I’ve never known a rat eat toads.

“Well,” Cat said in something like a rush, “Let’s get the shovel from your garage, and clear it away before we leave.”

* * *

The noise next time you couldn’t ignore. I shot out of bed and grabbed a torch and blundered downstairs to open the outer door. An almighty brawl was underway among the big ground-sweeping fronds of the Chinese fan-palm in the back yard corner. Leaves in the torch-beam thrashed and batted up and down and things thumped the hidden leaf-mould in splattering thuds. Something yowled like a half-choked dog. Something else screamed like a berserker banshee. A very, very berserk banshee. Right on the edge of hearing and molten with more than rage.

I got two steps past the door. Then I went back for the nearest defensive weapon, the big downstairs broom. With that under one arm like a boar spear I set out again. I was halfway across the lawn when the palm leaves convulsed and a possum shot past me grunting like a furious pig and up the quandong faster than an Olympic wall-climber. I never knew one could move so fast. The palm-fronds thrashed again. Something went wham! so hard the back picket fence reverberated. Then the ground-level yard was empty. It doesn’t need hearing, sometimes, to tell.

But I could still feel the heat.

As if someone opened a sauna door with a swamp inside. It poured over me, thick and breathless, almost solid with humidity. The steam of over-heated, stagnant water, the reek of rotting plants. And composted into the hot water and vegetable mulch, a slight, gamy, well-steamed tang of beast.

Somewhere between me and the back fence, receding into immeasurable distance, something roared.

I took the broom and the torch and got myself back inside and shut the door after me. And bolted it. For all the use my glass-paned wooden door would be, against something that could produce that basso profundo trump. Deep as a liner’s foghorn. Feral beyond any noise out of Africa.

Finally, everything went quiet. A couple of crickets. Then, somewhere overhead, something, maybe the disgruntled possum, brought down a shower of leaves. By then the smell, and the heat, had evaporated too. I didn’t wonder what had made the roar. I just put the broom away and went back to bed.

* * *

“Maybe, it was a cat.”

We went trotting out onto the riverside track. A couple of cyclists shot past. We called good morning to the usual elderly couple with the sort-of-Heinz-57 beagle, and started up the long stretch to the weir.

“Could have been, I suppose,” I said. I had a cat once, a quarter Persian, three pounds maximum, wet. But she could catch and carry home rabbits twice her weight.

“Well,” Cat said, after another fifty meters, “if a possum got into it with a good big tom...”

“Yeah.” And, I supposed, cats could scream that shrilly. I’ve heard them make almost every other noise. And cats are still hunters, for all we think them pets.

“Put out the live trap,” Cat could tell I was nervy. “Like you do for possums. If it’s some new cat, we can take it to the pound.”

“I could do that.” We swung round the curve at the weir foot. “I just don’t understand,” I managed between breaths as we topped the weir rise, “the heat.”

I could tell Cat had rolled her eyes at me. “Power flash,” she said very solemnly, and I said, “You mean another damn hot flush,” and in between breaths we laughed.

* * *

I put off setting the live trap, because things were quiet, then, for almost a week. I started to think it had all been just one passing anomaly. Maybe a cat, perhaps some other unexpected passerby, a goanna, a big carpet snake — one of the local pythons — something big enough and hungry enough to have a go at a possum. They aren’t the easiest prey: their fur is almost thick enough to stop a knife, they have arm and shoulder muscles like a wrestler, and clawed hands, and they bite. But a hungry carpet snake, I thought, or maybe a rare wanderer like an amethyst python, might be willing to have a try.

I did notice there’d been a sudden drop in the possum traffic. And there were still tracks in the lillipilli border. But, I thought, I could probably put up with a few of those.

Then I found the rat.

Rats live all through Ibisville, and my suburb, being older, and having lots of trees and undergrowth and old sheds, has more than most. This was nearly as big as a bandicoot, thick through the body as a man’s fist, with the long repulsive naked tail. It had put up a good fight. There was blood thrashed and sprayed all over the little concrete slope outside my garage doors, and more where the corpse lay. Upended and gutted, the way lions or cheetahs go for the softest parts of the beast.

And hanging in the just-dawn air, the smell. Rotting leaves, swamp water, heat. And through it, the tang of beast.

I was still standing there when Cat came down the drive again. She didn’t exclaim this time. She just came and stood with me, staring at the kill.

And the tracks.

There had been imprints in the herbaceous border, but these were blood on concrete, perfectly distinct. Small, the size a kangaroo rat’s would be, but not so narrow and long, and...

“Hey,” Cat said, bending closer despite the mess, “it’s got three toes.”

“Well, I suppose...” Something ticked over in memory and was gone again. I couldn’t remember how many toes a bandicoot has. I didn’t want to think.

“And there’s — maybe there were — I think there were two of them.” She circled carefully to one side. “See, different sizes? A lot smaller, in among the rest.”

“Carnivorous kangaroo rat?” I was meaning to be funny, but it didn’t work. “With a joey? Oh, gawd.”

“No, I don’t — I’m not sure.” Cat stood up and came and looked at me. She was just a touch pale about the gills. “Ari...” My full name is Arrhiane, but even under stress nobody uses it. “Are you OK?”

“I dunno... No. No, I don’t think I am.” I was, I thought, in danger of losing last night’s dinner, had it been there to lose. “I don’t think... at least...”

“No, let’s not run today.” She started herding me away toward the back-door. “Let’s just sit down and have a coffee before I have to catch the ferry.” We run so early because she teaches on the Island, half an hour’s catamaran trip out in the bay. “And just... Think what to do.”

We had the coffee, both of us, though I usually have tea. We managed not to talk about the rat for a while. And before Cat left, she said very soberly, “I think you better set the live trap tonight. This... this is getting a bit much.”

“Yeah.” I managed not to gulp. “If whatever it is got hold of somebody’s Chihuahua — ” Neither of us wanted to laugh.

“And there’s no saying it’ll stick to your yard. If it found the pen with those chooks...”

“Oh, god, yes.” One of my back-fence neighbours keeps fowls in the corner near my yard. And what, neither of us wanted to say, if it caught someone’s cat?

Or perhaps, however improbable, somebody’s small child?

“Okay,” I said. “Tonight I’ll set the trap.”

“Once it’s caught,” Cat added cheerfully, “we can call Parks and Wild Life, and they can figure what to do with — whatever it is.”

“I suppose.” I was thinking of the sounds under the fan-palm, and that blast of tropic swamp. “We can try to catch it, anyhow.”

My face must said a good deal more. Cat paused. Then said delicately, “I could stay over, if you like. Just for the night.”

“Would you? Would Kevin mind? Or the girls?” I was suddenly far more grateful than it all merited: for heaven’s sake, I told myself, it’s not big enough to bring a possum down. What can it do to an adult human being? “I have to admit, it’d be good to have someone here.”

Cat nodded and reached for her running shoes. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll go home from the ferry and cook tea, then come on here. And we’ll set the trap before it gets dark.”

Neither of us had to add: This time, the bait won’t be fruit or bread like we use for possums. This time, we’ll use fresh meat.

* * *

I live alone, and usually I like it that way, but that evening, making up the spare-room bed, cooking for two, hoping Cat’s daughters wouldn’t need a chauffeur that evening, I was grateful to think Cat was coming. Especially as I fetched the trap.

Normally it sits in my garage. It’s a small rectangular weld-mesh cage, with a drop door and a long wire over the top. One end hooks into the bait wire, that hangs down inside the far end of the cage. The other end sits in the loop at the top of the door, pulling it up and out. As soon as anything touches the bait, the long wire slips free, and the door drops. It’s strong enough to hold an irate possum all night. And anything else, I told myself, small enough to fit into it.

It was just dusk when we cut a piece off the shin-scrap from the butcher’s and wriggled it, with struggles and curses, onto the wire. We even used gloves, in case, as Cat said, the smell of human overrode the meat. Then we settled the trap, flat on the ground near the fan palm’s circumference, and set the door.

As we went back inside Cat said, “You could get your camera, you know.”

“My camera? For what?” I have a very good digital camera, with an excellent zoom and naturally a flash. “If — when we get anything, we just wait for daylight and then call Parks and Wildlife.”

“Yeah,” Cat said, looking back at the trap. “But it wouldn’t hurt to have a picture.” She looked around and grinned. “Just for us.’

“Okay,” I said after a minute. “Just for us.” I didn’t add, In case we do catch it, and by some unknown means, it gets out. So we at least have a record that it was real.

So we at least can see what it was.

* * *

We said goodnight and went to bed at a normal time. Everything was usual. Except I set the camera for night shots, and put it on the kitchen bar, and checked the torch, and put it by my bed. And wore pyjamas, instead of the usual T-shirt. If I’d had a pair of boots, I might have worn those as well.

Of course I never expected to sleep, and of course, just like the stories, I did doze off at some point. Because I came awake to the sound that hardly ever fails to rouse me. The metallic, unmistakeable snick! of the trap.

Adrenaline went through me in one piercing swoop. I grabbed for glasses and the torch and hissed, “Cat!” And as I groped for my bedroom door came a whang! of struck metal and the first outraged, high E shriek.

Cat flew out of the spare room and we snapped on lights, grabbed the camera, scurried down the inside stairs. Opened the door. I had the camera, Cat had taken the torch. She flashed it across the lawn and stopped in her tracks.

The cage was buckjumping. Bouncing isn’t the word for it, when the torch caught it the cage-bottom must have been a foot in the air, and whatever was inside was screaming at a pitch that hurt my ears. Not terror. I never doubted that. This was sheer, pure, murderous — yes, the word isn’t hyperbole — rage.

For a moment it froze the pair of us. But humans are hunters too, and our trap had worked. I turned the camera on. Cat flicked the over-the-door light, and out we went.

Across the lawn, past the quandong. Our shadows ran before us, huge as giants, and the cage literally gyrated, one end or the other flying off the ground while the screams escalated, hurting the ears. It wasn’t just furious now, it was fighting crazy. It actually hurled the cage toward us, three or four feet across the grass.

And the heat was there, the stench of rotted vegetation and steaming mud and water, and overriding it all, this time, the stench of beast.

“Holy Dooley!” I heard Cat exclaim just before she baulked. “Let’s get the pic and go!”

By some photographer’s instinct I put the camera on fast-take. “Hold the torch still,” I got out loud enough to be heard, and pointed the camera and shot.

The flashes were the final straw. I thought the cage was actually going to come apart. It did turn right over, spun half round — then the prisoner hit the far end full force and somehow, to a twang! and then a screech of abused metal, it got open the door.

Cat and I ran. We didn’t have to think. We were inside with the back door slammed before we realised something that fast and deadly would probably have caught us anyway. We just leaned on the wood and panted at each other, while outside the garden shivered to the cackle of startled fowls, and the last echo of that resounding whack! on the wood of the picket fence.

While around us, the air cooled, and the heat-smell faded away.

* * *

We sneaked out, in another ten minutes or so. The trap was on its side, half facing the back fence. Something had cut a swathe through my creeping begonias in the fern-house and the bottom of one picket had lost half a point. There were tracks, but the soft soil made them illegible. The last faint swamp-stink lingered. For a moment, I fancied I could almost hear the rustle of distant fronds.

“Okay,” Cat said after a minute or two. “At least, let’s see if you actually got a shot.”

Upstairs, we booted the computer and hooked up the camera. Decanted the photos — there were six — and brought them up on the desk-top screen. For a minute neither of us spoke.

Mine is a very good digital camera. The zoom can make sea-eagles recognisable on a rock where you miss them with the naked eye, and the fast-take and high resolution had worked magnificently. Two of the shots were largely blur. But the other four —

Scales, we identified first. Big enough for a python’s, mottled a pallid grey and blue. Cat said, “It’s a snake. How could a snake scream like that...?” I said, “No.”

The fourth shot had caught it ricocheting off the cage front. Not flank and side, but haunch and leg and foot. Like a miniature kangaroo, yes, without the fur. But the toes, yes.

A full-size kangaroo has hind-claws that can gut a dog. I worked out the relative scale and knew what happened to the rat.

The fifth shot was side-on, the cage full of twisting, contorted, serpentine-smooth and scaly wildly acrobatic hind and forelegs, a glimpse of rounded back and belly and flying, kangaroo-length tail.

The sixth had caught its face.

Up against the trap mesh, probably slashing at it with the teeth. Right into the zoom, so the long snaking neck, the low head-carriage and the head itself were perfectly clear.

The shape was there, the blunted diamond skull, with the extreme depth of head, the massive jaw and throat muscles you never see on a snake. The full gape showed the double rim of teeth. A snarl, that they nearly always use in raptor reproductions; we think we love the savage and the big. So long as it’s not too close.

I’d seen it in museums, in pictorial constructions. But this time the scales were shiny live and reflecting back the flash, the tongue and mouth glowed scarlet-pink, the teeth shone wet. A couple near the lower front had snapped, probably from hitting the cage. And there was furious, heedless, killer life and consciousness in the sheen of that deep-socketed bulging eye.

Cat let out a noise and bounced on the other office chair and I said, “Jesus Christ. I think it’s an allosaur.”

“A what?”

“A — a — ” There didn’t seem to be any air in my lungs. “A kind of dinosaur.”

Alive. Living, moving, lethal as a taipan. In my backyard.

For all the screams, it hadn’t been afraid. It had wanted out and maybe that was rage, but not just to escape. It had tackled the possum, that must have been more than its own body weight, and if it had got clear in time it wouldn’t have headed for the back fence. It would have come after us.

Cat was saying, too loudly, “What?”

I got my mouth to work at last. I almost sounded sane.

“A dinosaur. A carnosaur. A meat-eater. You know. Like T. Rex.” Everybody, after Jurassic Park, knows T. Rex.

“How do you know this isn’t?” Cat’s voice started going up. “Ari...!”

“T. Rex have longer heads. Pointier. Different teeth.” My filing system had animated without me. Good thing, some loony part was thinking, that you’re a semi-dino buff. “I’ve seen the reconstructions. This is just a little one. A... A micro-allosaur.”

I nearly did lose it then. Hysteria or disbelief or just plain shock. You’re not supposed to have a bit of the Cretaceous turn up in your 21st century backyard.

“A — a -!” Cat was doing more than lose it now. “It can’t have been! It’s a snake! A big goanna! We’re just imagining things...!”

“No.” I reversed the shots. It was there, head, face, jaw, neck, haunch, leg, tail. Claws. Cameras can distort a lot of truths, but this one hadn’t lied. Not four times in a row.

“But they’re extinct! How the hell” — Cat goes to church, she hardly ever swears — “did one turn up in your backyard?”

I put the mouse down, and shrugged my shoulders up, and said, “If we didn’t imagine it... I guess we’ll never know.”

* * *

Because I did know, then, already, that it wouldn’t come back. A fine new hunting range, no bigger predators, a soft tropic environment, almost like home. That’s one thing. It’s another to get snared in something no dinosaur could ever have encountered. Like a weld-mesh trap. No, when we heard the back fence reverberate that night, it was for the very last time.

But I can make a better — or at least, a wilder — guess at how it arrived. Alternate universes, universes next door? All the way-out ideas the quantum physics guys throw about. But to them the transfer of living things has to remain an impossible probability. I’m an SF writer. My what-ifs don’t have to stop with science. I recall that heat. The stink of swamp. That truly horrendous, full-scale roar.

Say a window, say a border. Along a suburban picket fence, with a bit of another universe(later than, earlier than us?) still in the Cretaceous Period, on the other side. And for some reason, the border opens, and the window’s big enough to slip through. For some small, hungry, savage predator, to hunt a different night.

And bring with it not just the ferocity, but the heat and smell of its own world.

If the camera had seen just a bit further, would it have caught cycad palms instead of golden cane?

I can’t show the photographs round — not unsupported, not in these days of CGI and Photoshop — and the tracks were too blurry to take a cast. Cat and I have consigned the whole topic to that uneasy limbo of Things Unresolved. I’m very thoroughly glad, though, that it never came back. I’ve had my own taste of the dinosaur ages, and I never want to watch Jurassic Park again. But if there’ll never be published proof, it’s rather piquant to claim, in fiction, that my backyard gets strange visitors.

That once, upon a certain time, it even had a micro-allosaur.

The End

Susurrus Press

Copyright © 2008 by Sylvia Kelso

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