davywavy | A Boys Own Adventure Story. Sort of.

A thrilling tale of derring-do and bravery set during the golden age of exploration and adventure. Featuring dinosaurs! Kinda.

In the winter evenings at the Explorers Club, after dinner had been consumed along with a glass or two of port, I would often find myself sitting next to a man named Carstairs. Carstairs wasn’t older than middle aged, but, by God, he had lived. Along one arm he had a scar given him by a lion in the Gambia, and he was missing the bottom half of one ear, shot off (he said) by an Arab jezzail a few miles outside Damascus over the matter of a lady. He was always full of stories; tales of how he had carried a fellow explorer across the pack ice of Baffin Island after their voyage to the arctic had been wrecked, or of fighting off cannibals in the South Seas, or of prospecting for Gold in the California hills. Carstairs was full of tales and I believed every one of them.
One night as we sat in front of a dying fire sharing a late smoke, he leaned forward and banked the glowing embers so his face reflected red in their light and asked me, in a half-joking, half serious way whether I would like to hear the tale of his most unusual and terrifying adventure? Unsure of whether I was being in some way teased I said I would and his face immediately took on a darker complexion, as if memories he did not care to remember had been suddenly called forth by my words. He sat back in his armchair and fiddled with his pipe for a few moments.

“It was like this”, he said. He seemed to be looking at the tobacco he was tamping into his pipe, but I knew he was watching me. “Carruthers and I – you won’t have met Carruthers, the poor fellow – Carruthers and I had been on the trail of a rather odd legend for some months. You see, he’d come across some mention of an old legend in some book of myths or other and, at the drop of a hat, had decided to take a look into it. Carruthers was always a great one for some adventure or expedition or other, and an odd legend was meat to him. He roped me in with his usual wild tales and, well, to cut a long story short we’d taken ship and...well, I shan’t tell you where we took ship to. You might be tempted to follow in our footsteps and that wouldn’t do at all. Some things are best left alone. Well alone. We’ll say it was somewhere in what they call the dark places on the map, where civilised men have only made a few forays, if at all. One of the places where even today, simply anything might lurk.

“We’d arrived and engaged some native bearers and set out roughly northwards, all on the nod from Carruthers who talked to every native we met and stopped at every village, asking after, well, after anything queer, really. And after a while of asking we started to get answers – hints, you know. Dark stories of men who’d gone out and come back...changed. Native hunters and workers who nobody’d seen in a while would return and just throw aside their tools and sit until they starved, or worse go on a rampage trying to destroy as much as they could before they were stopped.

“After some weeks or even months of this there definitely started to show a pattern in the stories we heard around the campfires of innumerable villages told by wise women or old men in fearful, whispering voices. Tales of something in the hills which took men and changed them, of some ancient horror long thought forgotten by the world. So naturally it was to those hills we went."

Here Carstairs stopped and stared into the fire for a long while. I thought for a time of slipping away as he was obviously reliving some dark event from the past, but after a time he looked around and continued.

“Carruthers and I led our group into the hills, and the further we went the more it seemed there was something in the air which affected us, sapping the will and bringing with it a heavy foreboding. The bearers were the first – one by one they were overcome and simply laid down their loads, refusing to take another step forwards until in the end it was just Carruthers and I struggling down defiles and ravines, looking for whatever mystery these hills held. Between us we’d abandoned everything which wasn’t necessary for survival, just water and some shot for hunting and a few other essentials and as the days wore on these grew low. Eventually, wracked by hunger and thirst, we took to exploring a network of caves which seemed promising and, one moonlit night we breached a cave mouth and looked down into a valley. By the silver light we could see a river snaking down the middle of it and lush vegetation down the walls and there was something about the sight which told us that, whatever it was we had been looking for, we had found it. From the trees and bushes came curious grunting and rustles; something unseen was amongst the foliage but our bellies drove us on.

“Carruthers bade me hang back. ‘I’m going to make a run for the waterhole’, he said, indicating a gleam where reflected moonlight shone off water perhaps a hundred yards distant. ‘Dawn is coming, so it is now or never. Hopefully I can fill out canteens before whatever lives in this valley sees me.’ With that, he was away, sidling through the long grass, alert to any danger. As he went in the pink light of early dawn, I became aware that a figure had detached itself from the brush and was moving to incept him.
“What a figure! I can barely describe it. In some lights it might have looked like a man, but a man you might only see in models in some museum of natural history. Squat it was, and shaggy of brow, and from its eyes there gleamed a baleful cunning and hatred. Carruthers saw it too late and before he could react it was upon him, grabbing his arm with one paw. With that, it pulled him close and appeared to speak – I could not hear the words – and then pushed him away, back up the hill towards me. He staggered like a man who has been struck a blow and as he returned I saw he was pale with shock and fear. He sat and gulped, and I could see there were tears of fright in his eyes. ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘What did it say?’
“Carruthers fixed me with a stare. ‘It said...it said…’
‘Yes?’
‘It said there was to be no access to the waterhole until the current dispute with management was resolved.’
’God’, I said. ‘My God.’
‘Yes’, replied Carruthers. ‘The legends were true. We have found the lost valley of the Trades Unionists.’

“And so it proved. As the sun rose it revealed to us sight which no civilised eyes had ever before beheld. Here and there across the valley there would be a group of them in donkey jackets, grazing on ham and tomato sandwiches around a fire in an old oil drum, whist distantly across the open plain a herd migrated slowly beneath a banner reading “One out, all out” past piles of French sheep which lay blazing in the morning sun. Trades Unionists, those awful, antediluvian creatures, remnants of an age gladly forgotten by the earth and whom nature herself had consigned to history had here, in this forgotten place, somehow survived the end of their era. All that was needed to make the vista complete would have been a lonely pterodactyl winging its way overhead, and I said as much to Carruthers.
‘Grounded by air traffic control industrial action’, he nodded grimly.

“I looked out over the primeval herds. ‘It barely seems possible’, I whispered. ‘Not one of them has a brain larger than a walnut and yet they walk upright.’
Carruthers nodded. ‘To take one back alive...’ he whispered, half to himself. ‘The boon to science would be incredible.’
“I shook my head. ‘Madness, Carruthers. Madness’. I pointed back up the side of the hill to where the cave mouth we had exited mere minutes before was visible. A small group of Trades Unionists had already started to form around it, drawn by some unholy instinct. ‘Look’, I said. ‘They’re already forming a picket to protest that there are no women in our group. We’ll never get past to freedom without being heckled. We have to leave now!’

“But Carruthers was not to be swayed. We argued too long in that hellish place; he determined to capture a Trades Unionist to prove to the world that such horrors had truly once bestridden the Earth, whilst I argued for leaving quickly before it was too late. By the time I had argued him to my way of thinking, the picket line across the cave entry was eight or ten deep and the group had broken out a large tea-urn. Many had brought newborns and toddlers to artificially boost the numbers and they sat in pushchairs looking unhappy and confused.
‘We’ll have to drive them away’, said Carruthers. ‘Look, old man, here’s what we’ll do. I’ll try to draw them off, and you drive off any stragglers with something they fear.’
‘Draw them away? Carruthers, you fool, how will you escape?’
‘Don’t worry about me old man. I’ll capture one and bring it back. Never fear, I’ll get away.’

“And with that, Carruthers was away. He ran like a hare in front of the picket line, opening his wallet and saying, loudly enough to be overheard, ‘Gosh, look at all these subsidies. Whatever can I spend these subsidies on? Heavens above, I’ve simply no idea. If only I could think of somebody to give subsidies to. And there’s so much money here. Heavens.’
“Almost as one, the herd moved after him, giving hooting calls of pleading and entitlement. Only a few remained at the cave entrance, sulkily demanding time-and-a-half and benefits before they would even stand up and walk. With that I leapt to my feet and ran at them, bellowing with all my breath. “Cuts!” I shouted. “Public sector cuts! Lower taxes! One man, one vote!” At this the remaining Union members started and loped away, braying with fear. “Og fear secret ballots!” one cried, and “Me not respect democratic will of wider electorate” another. And so I made my way out of that awful valley which civilisation had forgotten and slowly made my way home. I was found weeks later wandering and delirious by a group of friendly natives who nursed me back to health and some months later I was back here a sadder, wiser man. And Carruthers? I never saw him again.‘
‘Was he lost in that valley of unholy terrors?’, I asked.
‘Lost? No. He captured a trades Unionist and brought it home. Unfortunately it promptly escaped onto the underground and the last I heard, Carruthers was still stuck at Raynes Park waiting for a train which was not running due to staff shortages. The fool. The poor, brave fool.’

The End.