Lost Worlds Short Stories Read online

  This is a FLAME TREE Book

  Publisher & Creative Director: Nick Wells

  Project Editor: Laura Bulbeck

  Editorial Board: Catherine Taylor, Josie Mitchell, Gillian Whitaker

  Thanks to Will Rough

  Publisher’s Note: Due to the historical nature of the classic text, we’re aware that there may be some language used which has the potential to cause offence to the modern reader. However, wishing overall to preserve the integrity of the text, rather than imposing contemporary sensibilities, we have left it unaltered.

  FLAME TREE PUBLISHING

  6 Melbray Mews, Fulham, London SW6 3NS, United Kingdom

  www.flametreepublishing.com

  First published 2017

  Copyright © 2017 Flame Tree Publishing Ltd

  Stories by modern authors are subject to international copyright law, and are licensed for publication in this volume.

  PRINT ISBN: 978-1-78664-181-6

  EBOOK ISBN: 978-1-78755-243-2

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  The cover image is created by Flame Tree Studio, based on artwork by Slava Gerj and Gabor Ruszkai.

  A copy of the CIP data for this book is available from the British Library.

  Introducing our new fiction list:

  FLAME TREE PRESS | FICTION WITHOUT FRONTIERS

  Award-Winning Authors & Original Voices

  Horror, Crime, Science Fiction & Fantasy

  www.flametreepress.com

  Contents

  Foreword by Adam Roberts

  Publisher’s Note

  An Echo of Gondwana

  Mike Adamson

  Tears of the Gods

  Sarah L. Byrne

  The Temple of the Cat

  Thomas Canfield

  The Lost World (chapters VII–X)

  Arthur Conan Doyle

  Wolf Brother’s Song

  Ronald D. Ferguson

  Baryonyx Crossing

  Kevin M. Folliard

  Herland (chapters I–II)

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman

  King Solomon’s Mines (chapters VIII–XIII)

  H. Rider Haggard

  The Shell-Spire

  Sara M. Harvey

  The Lost Race

  Robert E. Howard

  The Man Who Would Be King

  Rudyard Kipling

  At the Mountains of Madness

  H.P. Lovecraft

  In Ice Entombed

  K.G. McAbee

  The Face in the Abyss (chapters I–V)

  A. Merritt

  A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (chapters I–VI)

  James De Mille

  The Diamond Lens

  Fitz-James O’Brien

  The Matter Concerning Mr. Symmes and the Hollow World

  Michael Penncavage

  Short Straw

  Rebecca Schwarz

  The Road to Cathacara

  James C. Simpson

  A Map of Illusions

  David Sklar

  Gulliver’s Travels (part I, chapters I–VI)

  Jonathan Swift

  The Sign in the Moonlight

  David Tallerman

  Adlivun (The Beneath)

  Rachel Verkade

  Journey to the Centre of the Earth (chapters XXX–XXXIX)

  Jules Verne

  The Lady of the Lost Valley

  John Walters

  In the Abyss

  H.G. Wells

  The Country of the Blind

  H.G. Wells

  Biographies & Sources

  Foreword: Lost Worlds Short Stories

  Is it the worlds that are lost, or us? Readers have marvelled at travellers’ tales for hundreds of years, but there comes a time when the actual world has been fully visited, marked out and mapped. Of course our hunger for the thrill of such explorers’ tales doesn’t go away when the globe is wholly explored. Indeed, if anything the appetite increases, as we sense that some special kind of glamour is ebbing from life. And so story-tellers take us to new realms, lost worlds and imaginary places, to supply the adventure, excitement and wonder we crave. It is not a coincidence that the great vogue for ‘Lost World’ stories coincided with the height of the imperial age. These are narratives that speak to a desire not only to know, but somehow to possess the wonders they describe.

  This anthology collects together some of the most famous, and the best, of these tales. It’s a testament, amongst other things, to the amazing variety of this kind of story. Some of them take us deeper into the only recently explored territories of what used to be called ‘the third world’: a South American volcanic plateau, upon which dinosaurs escaped extinction, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World; or to Antarctica in James De Mille’s ‘A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder’ and H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘At the Mountains of Madness’; or into the heart of Africa in H. Rider Haggard’s ‘King Solomon’s Mines’; or beyond Afghanistan in Rudyard Kipling’s peerless ‘The Man Who Would Be King’. Others, like H.G. Wells’s ‘In the Country of the Blind’ and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘Herland’, are set in more nebulously identified ‘uncharted lands’. Other writers elected to repudiate merely horizontal exploration, and to move their imaginations vertically, or in stranger directions even than that. A. Merritt’s ‘The Face in the Abyss’ and Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth take us into the bowels of the earth, whilst Wells’s ‘In the Abyss’ glimpses a strange civilization in the depths of the ocean. Howard’s ‘The Lost Race’ takes us back in time and underground, and Fitz-James O’Brien imagines a new world so microscopic it can fit inside a single droplet of water. Some of the stories are satirical – Jonathan Swift casts a cold eye on the absurdity of society in his lost worlds, and Gilman wants to make us rethink our preconceptions about gender. But the best kind of ‘Lost Worlds’ story is always more than just a satirical reflection on the known. It is a gateway into the possibilities of the unknown, and a pledge that however comprehensively geography and science apprehend the world there are still new realms for us to seek out.

  If we ask where this urge to explore comes from, we are not likely to be satisfied with a merely geographical answer. It’s part of who we are, as individuals, as a species, not something easily satiated with any particular or material discovery. We are looking, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, for that untravelled world whose margin fades for ever and for ever as we move. We call this genre ‘Lost Worlds’, not ‘Found Worlds’, after all; and the best of these kinds of tales intrigue and lead us on even as they supply our sensibilities with wonder and novelty. They are stories that disclose, rather than enclose, and that tells us something important about the human experience – that we are still drawn to the unknown, because it is the unknown that defines us.

  Adam Roberts

  www.adamroberts.com

  Publisher’s Note

  This latest title in our deluxe Gothic Fantasy short story anthologies is packed with high adventure – from dark valleys and high mountain passes, to ancient creatures and mysterious races. Once again, in order to include some of the best examples of the classic fiction in the Lost Worlds genre, we have provided some tantalizing extracts from longer novels – but all come with a link at the end to download the full story. Featuri
ng such iconic works as Arthur Conan Doyle’s dinosaur epic The Lost World and H.P. Lovecraft’s chilling tale At The Mountains of Madness, as well as some rarer finds like Fitz-James O’Brien’s ‘The Diamond Lens’, you’ll discover pockets of the unknown in the strangest of places.

  Every year the response to our call for submissions seems to grow and grow, giving us a rich universe of stories to choose from, but making our job all the more difficult in narrowing down the final selection. We’ve loved delving into such a variety of worlds out of time and out of place, and ultimately chose a selection of stories we hope sit alongside each other and with the classic selection, to provide a fantastic Lost Worlds book for all to enjoy.

  An Echo of Gondwana

  Mike Adamson

  The mountains of eastern Australia are an ancient land, and their high, cool rainforests hold their secrets close. I could not have said what silent stirring drew me, my whole life through, to their mysterious glades, but a day came when I could face something grander and more terrifying than I ever imagined this world could hold.

  These feelings first stirred in me as a youngster in Adelaide, a school trip to the Art Gallery on North Terrace, and I found myself looking up at Isaac Whitehead’s 1859 painting In the Sassafrass Valley, Victoria. This canvas has bewitched me ever since with its infinitude of detail, the dark depths of the understory, the sunlit upperworks of treeferns and exotic giants, the rushing stream tumbling in its bed, the whole dwarfing the tiny figures of explorers who move before the titanic scale of nature as if among the feet of gods and colossi. I stared at the painting for a long time, unable to tear myself away, uncaring for the other masterworks around it, and looking back when my teacher drew me on with the party. I visited again many times over the years and the painting has never lost its spell. Now, perhaps, I understand why.

  There is a spirit in this land, as there probably is in every land. I do not know if what I perceive is the same spirit the indigenous Australians have always known and understood, and I have not trespassed upon their sacred traditions in my own need to know, but I have felt the soul that dwells in the land, and sensed the frightening scale on which time and nature move. These are things one does not take lightly, and I let my instinctive respect for these mysteries guide me.

  My workmates never understood my reluctance to include them in my bushwalks and camping expeditions – I wanted solitude, not mateship around a campfire. Long nights of drinking would undo the delicate tracery of interconnections I was seeking, and I wanted only to get as far from other human beings as I could. Davy Evans is a loner, they would say. Just leave him be. Not all national parks allow camping, yet to feel the spirit of the wild by night was a siren song, and I knew I must stand among the ancient woodlands, alone and undisturbed, to absorb anything of the strange power they held.

  You see, these forests are called the Gondwana Rainforests, and are held to be the last islands of unbroken living continuity from the time of the dinosaurs. Australia, along with Antarctica, India and others formed the southern supercontinent, named for Gondwana, in India, which broke up into the present masses over many millions of years. Many ancient lineages are found in the scattered highland forests, now isolated by elevation and terrain from each other and many secrets lie undiscovered. The Wollemi Pine was found in my own lifetime, thought to date from the Jurassic, and such an ocean of time strikes one mute with awe.

  Perhaps it was the depth of the ages I sought, some tangible contact with the truly ancient, but these forests drew me back many times over the years – Barrington Tops, Mt. Seaview, Dorrigo, Mt. Hyland and more, clear up from New South Wales to the Daintree on the Queensland coast. To place my bare palm upon the trunk of a giant of the woods, itself many centuries old, but whose genetic lineage ran back into the mists of prehistory, was to feel a shudder in my spine and hear a whisper at the edges of my mind, as if something great and more than a little frightening was trying to speak to me.

  As I grow older I have become contemptuous of human society. The ever-increasing hurry and bluster, rank commercialism and corruption which sever us so completely from our natural origins, blocking out all notions of any reality before itself, repel me. Perhaps this disconnect from the time we live in is why I have no family to follow on, and while there is reason to lament in this, there is also a cold logic. The compulsion of my life has never failed to call, and each time I went back into the high country I felt I drew closer.

  Closer to what, I did not know. Not until the night closed around me.

  * * *

  They say the moon affects the cycles of life in the ocean all over the world, both with the tides and its phases, and a full moon often makes people do crazy things – according to hospital ERs. Maybe it was the full moon that made me drive up into the highlands, looking for any way to even be close to the relic forests as spring turned toward summer, and my GPS found me a little-used graded track, maybe a forestry or fire service way. I followed it in my 4WD with a sense of trespass as afternoon turned to evening and the green of the Australian forest before the heat of summer arrives surrounded me with its wild randomness. Truly, eucalypts often seem frozen in the act of gesticulation, thrashing in some extremis upon a timescale to which we are not privy, and this gives the landscape a sense of both baroque complexity and the untamed.

  I had approached these highlands by more usual routes in the past but sensed I was in familiar country. I could retrace my way easily enough, and was not lost. I had my hiking kit, tough boots, mobile phone, flashlight and camera, all the bits and pieces one collects to travel safely in the wild places, water bottle, first aid kit, bug repellent, emergency rations. Much of it was rarely needed, but better to have it than not.

  I found a parking spot under cover of spreading branches late in the day and rested for a while before checking my maps and taking a GPS fix on my location. I had no idea quite where I would end up but navigating back to the vehicle in the dark was another matter. I was not foolhardy, I meant to take no risks, but the ephemeral call of the ancient land would not be denied, and as the sun dropped behind the trees and plunged the peaks into a maze of golden glow and shadows, I locked my car, hefted my light pack and set off toward the towering trees of the relic. I was not sure how close I would get, close enough, I hoped.

  Night in the bush is truly dark as city folk cannot appreciate. Pure, sable darkness, unrelieved but for the light of the stars, can be frightening, as can the silence of the outback. Here there was breeze in the treetops and the thousand minute sounds of the night, and I closed up my tough jacket as the cool of evening built. The moon would rise in a while, a few nights past full. I found a sun-warmed rock to rest upon among the gigantic trees, the araucarias and Antarctic beech, the treeferns and podocarps, and simply closed my eyes to listen to the world.

  This was what I had sought so long, to be in the right place at the right time, to feel the flowing currents in the earth, to almost hear the resonance of the songlines sacred to the First Australians. It occurred to me I really had no business being here, but the earth itself seemed accepting; the land told me I was welcome for the moment and that meant more than human permits. I tried to divorce my ego and view the world with a blank mental slate, let each sound and feeling provide its own meaning. I breathed deeply, concentrated on a smooth cycling of breath, and waited for the moonrise.

  What did I smell? The forest was an amalgam of growth and decay, stirred by the fresh wind. When I listened beyond the rush of blood in my ears, past the tinitis of the modern age, I heard the minute scratchings of tiny feet as nocturnal animals appeared, the flutter of microbats hunting insects, the hiss and chitter of the latter; the surreal sounds of rare and exotic frogs in a watercourse not far away, and the tread of larger animals out there in the night.

  How primal was this…? Totally, I judged, for here nature alone held sway. In these peaks life’s pageant was unbroken for 150 million years, at least, ther
e had always been a forest in this place since the days when reptiles ruled, and the depth of time seemed to drop away from me like a bottomless chasm as I tried to envision it. I felt giddy, suspended over an eternity and liable to plunge into its immensity if I lost my hold on the here and now.

  Perhaps this was the real terror of the wild – not even untamed but utterly beyond even knowledge of the fiction of human reality. This world, this place, was oblivious of the doings of the human race, mankind was merely an abstraction. To come face to face with such a notion was profoundly satisfying, though I knew it was my own interpretation grafted upon nature. Yet it was pleasing, as if feeling my way to a fundamentality of existence, and I explored it silently, seeming more and more comfortable here.

  Perhaps I began to fall into a shallow, shallow sleep, for it seemed my mind drifted in a warm, suggestible cocoon of impressions. That narrow band between waking and sleeping – still conscious enough for the mind to be aware yet enough asleep for the dream cortex to be engaged – was a rich hunting ground for the mind’s self-reflexive property, the raising of memories, impressions and needs to the mirror of dream.

  Some say dreams are a gateway to the unseen. Certainly the First Australians place great value on dream perception, as do other peoples around the world, and as I fell gently into a meditative regimen I felt nothing amiss, nothing jarred. The world was a microcosm of possibilities and I was open to them, come what may.

  I had no preconceptions other than the lifelong calling which told me something waited here to be found, and as I slipped into the strange waking-dream state I remained aware of the cooling evening air, the sounds of the forest around me, but through my closed eyelids I began to perceive the world by the light of a great silver moon which seemed somehow different from the one I expected to clear the trees in a while.

  The forest seemed to shimmer, to tremble with a life so pronounced it was an unseen current of vast potential. A waterfall in the distance, seen between the giant trunks, glimmered in its plummet, the moonlight making of it a shaft of quicksilver though its rumble was far removed. The night was filled with calls and cries in voices I could not recognise, strange hootings and ululations, screeches and distant, base resonances. What fluttered before the moon seemed bat-like but like no bat I had ever seen, and the sense of creeping life in every part of this woodland was overwhelming. The smell of the forest was strong, rich, earthy, yet the air was not the air of modern times, some quality of its content or ionic relationships was simply different.