Raymond Stantz

It's early evening in the Republic of the Congo on the other side of the door. The creatures of the forest are making their usual noises; the bugs of the region are competing with one another to see who will survive the night's onslaught of birds and other creatures; and a somewhat wide-eyed, dark-skinned scientist is standing at the edge of a forest clearing, trying- without much success- to communicate with a massive robotic carnosaur half-concealed by the foliage around him.

"Dr. Ndebele? Grimlock?" Ray calls. "We're here..."

Organic and mech alike look up at th at.

As Ray returned to the camp in the Lake Tele jungles, Dr. Ndebele looked up. "Dr. Stantz. We have visitors," he said.

"People visitors, or claws and snarls and fire visitors?" Ray asked immediately. On jobs like this it never hurt to be sure.

"People visitors," said Ndebele. "And the kind without guns, at that. But there is a problem."

He stepped aside to indicate two men of a little under five feet tall each. They were both considerably darker-skinned than Ndebele himself, with equally short hair, but they wore fairly Western-looking clothing. Their footgear appeared handmade, though, and they carried well-worn knives. One of them, who looked somewhat older than his companion, leaned on a walking-stick as he glanced, unimpressed, at Ray. The other tilted his head expectantly and said something in French.

"… um. Malheureusement? Je suis seulement un American?" Ray tried. "Dr. Ndebele, please tell me you can translate-"

"That would be the problem," said Ndebele dryly. "These are Mokoloba and Dondolo, of the Baka people of this region. They had been following us through the jungle to see what your intentions were. Mokoloba says that Dondolo can tell you of the creature who attacked the bushmeat men… but Dondolo speaks no French, and I speak no Baka."

"Huh boy."

Judging by the Baka men's responses, that translated well enough on its own.

Several hours later, Dondolo's information was finally hashed out. It ran something like this:

"There has been a creature in these jungles larger than any elephant since a hundred years ago. A thunderstone fell from the skies in midsummer. My grandfather's father first heard the creature after that, when he was young. It howled like a mad thing, driving the game away; he went to look for it. The beast that he saw was caught in the mud, thrashing, and its eyes burned like fire. It tore at the trees but could not pull itself free, and it sank from sight."

"My grandfather's father saw it again years later, when the hunters came from England to find the Mokele-mbembe and shoot it-"

"The creature wasn't the Mokele-mbembe, then?" Ray interrupted.

Dondolo shook his head. "No. It was not. He would have known the river beast on sight. This was something else."

Ray glanced at Ndebele, who only lifted his shoulders a little. "Go on," Ray said.

"The hunters asked my grandfather's father to help them find the river beast. He brought them to the place it was last seen, but he found no sign of it. Only strange tracks, like something that walks upright, but huge. He remembered the creature in the mud, and tried to tell the Englishmen, but they did not listen. When they drew close to where the creature had sunk he asked them to turn back, but they would not. It came at them out of the forest then, and they shot at it, but it shouted at them."

"Really."

"Yes." Dondolo fingered his stick. "The creature spoke to them in Baka. It wanted to know why they were shooting at it. But they were so afraid that they ran off before he could translate, and did not come back."

"Huh." Ray considered this. "What did your great-grandfather do?"

"He was afraid of the creature too," said Dondolo, "but he stood where he was, and it only looked at him. It said it wanted to sleep and grow strong, or else it would chase him too. Then it turned and went back into the jungle, and he did not see it again in his lifetime."

Ray started to nod at that, but there was something about the phrasing that bothered him. As he turned the possibility over he said, "Has anyone else seen it?"

"My father's second wife," said Dondolo. "She came of the Bangombe tribe. When she was a young woman the men of the Bangombe had built a fence in their river to keep Mokele-mbembe from interfering with their fishing. A river beast broke through anyway, and the men killed it. There was a great feast of victory afterwards, but she did not take part, because she did not feel well. She was gathering firewood when she heard the creature in the forest, and saw two burning blue eyes far, far overhead. It started to bend down to look at her, but she was afraid, and she ran. She says it called to her in Lingala, asking her to return, but she did not listen. When she returned to the spot with the men who were willing to come away from the feast, it was gone. It left only wrecked trees and burned growth where it walked. All the men who came with her grew sick and died afterwards."

Ray glanced at Ndebele, then back at Dondolo. "How quickly?"

"Within a week," was the answer. "As if all their insides were trying to escape."

"Eew. What about your father's second wife?"

"She did not take sick," Dondolo said, "though she was so frightened at the creature, and at the falling of the men, that she was only too happy to marry my father and leave that place."

"Sensible of her," Ray murmured. "Thank you, Dondolo. Anything else?"

"It has been awake lately," was the answer. "I have seen it moving, myself. Something great and shining grey, its back like a wet lizard-"

That was when the memory hit him, of a small, slender volume squashed into the Miskatonic library, a book by an explorer named Seaton who had visited the Congo in the 1850s. The Sleeping Gods are vortices of power in natural form, and may not be seen by human eyes, ran the Seaton account. On rare occasions they can draw together bodies for themselves, to lure men to them for service. These bodies are monstrous and bear some resemblance to enormous reptiles, though inspection reveals their utter dissimilarity to any reptiles that ever walked the face of the earth. Such close inspection is not advised, however. . .

Ray shivered a little, nodded, and thanked the men. He'd never been so glad that he'd packed the Spates Catalog along with him in his life, but he was pretty sure he wasn't going to get any sleep tonight.

Ray stepped out of Milliways and back into the Laico Hotel Maya Maya. The Bar didn't generally grab him randomly, but it happened from time to time if something important enough was happening. K's getting nabbed and his memory mangled probably counted. He'd have to think about that later, though; there was a man on the other side of the lobby who rather nicely matched the descriptions and photographs the State Department had given him. Ray stuck up an arm and waved. "Dr. Ndebele?" he called, hoping he'd pronounced it right. "Dr. Joseph Ndebele? Over here, sir."

Dr. Ndebele was a dark-skinned man with close-cropped hair, a broad face, and round, wire-rimmed glasses. He wore a blue linen suit that buttoned up neatly around the neck like a Nehru jacket, and he carried a steel briefcase. At the sound of his name he looked up and smiled. "Ah," he said in English, "Dr. Stantz, is it? Or do I call you Ambassador for this?"

"Honestly, sir, the Ambassador title kind of gives me the bahoogies when it comes from anybody who hasn't got gills," Ray said apologetically. "Dr. Stantz is fine. It's an honor to meet you, sir. I'm told the restaurant here's good- did you want to talk there or in one of the meeting rooms?"

"The restaurant will do nicely. Thank you." Dr. Ndebele adjusted his glasses. "I'm sorry to have kept you waiting."

"Not at all, sir, not at all. I'm sorry I couldn't have been here to meet you sooner myself." A waiter in yellow and red led them to a small table in the next room. "Although I hope you speak better French than I do."

"How on Earth did you get into the diplomatic corps without being taught French?" asked Dr. Ndebele, one eyebrow slightly raised.

"It wasn't my idea," Ray answered. "I’m a parapsychologist and an engineer by training, not a diplomat. I got called on for the position after four better-qualified people in a row quit the job. Not to mention that-"

"-fish-people don't speak French," Dr. Ndebele finished for him. "Yes, I see."

"I did spend most of the trip here plugged into a Berlitz course, for what that's worth."

"Not very much, to be honest. The dialect here isn't so easy to assimilate as that." Dr. Ndebele glanced at the menu briefly, then set it aside and reached for his briefcase instead. "We shall see… Dr. Stantz, I'd like to get straight to the point, if I may?"

Ray spread his hands. "By all means," he said. "The sooner the better."

"Thank you." Ndebele slid his glasses back up his nose again. "How much has the State Department told you about my situation?"

"Well, to start with, three weeks ago you were on a research expedition in the Lake Tele area sponsored by the University of Cape Town," Ray said. "Primatology, specifically."

"Correct. My specialty is rare and endangered primates of the Congo basin."

"Which, it said, brought you into conflict with a group of bushmeat hunters-"

Ndebele muttered something under his breath, which Ray was rather grateful not to understand. "Too kind a word for them, Dr. Stantz. These men were trappers and thieves. Their prey would have gone to the European market and no one but them would have been the better for it. I've known hunters. These men were nothing like."

Ray nodded. "They sounded like a thoroughly nasty piece of business," he allowed. "I saw in the reports that they threatened to- well, I won't repeat what they threatened, but that's an awful kind of thing to say. Was there a specific reason for that?"

"When a man with a university at his back, and the scientific community watching him, reports on the faces and operations of a group of slaughterers, it becomes very hard for the local government not to take action," said Ndebele dryly. "I could not hurt them then. I could only hurt their operation if I escaped, and told the story."

"So you weren't particularly famous, or known to them, or some kind of long-standing nemesis of theirs?"

"Only in the way that the best sniffer dogs are known to smugglers," said Ndebele. "They knew my name, but we had never met."

"Gotcha," Ray said. "Okay, then. They threatened you, you refused to back down, aaaand…. That's the point where everything went to hell, right?"

"Aptly put, Dr. Stantz." Ndebele interlaced his fingers on the table in front of him. "The vegetation began cracking somewhere behind the thugs, as if a very large animal were coming through. I have heard such noises before; you take them seriously in the deep jungle country. Elephants, hippos… you don't take chances with hippos. Nasty beasts."

"So I hear," said Ray. "The description gets a little short on details after that."

"Yes, well-" Ndebele shifted in his seat. "Dr. Stantz, I told the authorities that the trees themselves were smashed aside, and that something in the darkness began shouting words I could not understand. I said this because it was the very limit of what I thought I could say and still have them believe me. Respect for academics only goes so far, here."

Ray waited.

"Dr. Stantz… I saw the creature with my own eyes. Not much. Not for long. But it was not the Mokele-mbembe of the legends." Ndebele shifted again. "The creature was too big for that. Too big by far. The Mokele-mbembe is a beast as big as two elephants; this was larger. I saw only the head, but not one of the stories of the riverbeast say that its head was as long as a man…"

Ray whistled. "What did it look like?" he wondered.

"Like nothing I have ever seen," confessed Ndebele. "Its skin was shining, the way a hippo looks when it emerges from the water. Grey skin, or green- I could not say. The creature's very eyes were glowing- not reflecting. Glowing. I have seen enough animals by the light of a campfire to know the difference. "

Ray frowned a little, thinking. "This sounds oddly familiar," he mused. "What color were its eyes, anyway?"

"Blue, and slanted," said Ndebele. "Why do you ask?"

"Were you aware of the reports of the Frashingly-Smalth expedition to the Lake Tele area in 1922?"

Ndebele shook his head, his forehead creasing. Ray dug into his own briefcase. "According to the reports of the expedition, Lord Frashingly-Smalth set out to snag a Mokele-mbembe for his trophy wall and encountered something else. Still dinosaurian in bodyplan, mind you, but not the classical sauropod form. The one he shot at was bipedal, not unlike some of the larger species of theropod, with glowing blue- are you all right?"

Wordlessly, Ndebele unlocked his briefcase and handed Ray a sheaf of photographs. Several he'd already seen- the wrecked, burned trees, the slashes too high and too deep on the trees to be the work of machetes alone- but the last few were of the forest floor itself. Specifically, of footprints sunk into the leafmould that covered the soil.

If the measuring stick next to the three-toed impression were anywhere close to accurate, Ray was looking at a footprint left by something the size and approximate shape of a Carcharodontosaurus.