Lost Worlds Read Online Free PDF Page B

before.
    He swilled the Coke in the bottle and took another sip. Professor Livingstone’s visit had disturbed him. He didn’t see his guardian that often; when she did visit it was usually on
the back of a conference or seminar that she was attending in London. She would pop in, check that he looked healthy and that the place was tidy, ask what he’d been up to and then leave. He
knew she had the power to check his use of the bank accounts that had been set up for him and to veto any unusual payments, but he was careful not to abuse the financial freedom he’d been
given. The two of them had a reasonably good relationship – not like mother and son, but more like aunt and nephew. He only vaguely remembered her from before the accident, but he knew that
she had been a good friend of his mother and father, and he knew that she felt as if she was paying tribute to their memory by looking after him – she and his great-aunt between them. He just
wished she wouldn’t. He was perfectly capable of looking after himself.
    And why had she brought her daughter with her? Calum had never met Natalie before, and wasn’t sure that he ever wanted to again. She was obviously more used to a sunny Californian
shopping-mall environment than a rainy London street and a warehouse that dated back several hundred years and which still smelt of rum and tobacco and the other things that had been shipped out
along the Thames from its loading docks. He’d spotted her looking around with barely disguised distaste; glancing at the bare brick walls and the wooden floorboards that had absorbed all
kinds of spills from various cargoes in the past.
    It was probably a good thing that she hadn’t gone down to the ground floor, where Calum stored a lot of the stuff that had been passed through generations of the Challenger family to
Calum’s great-grandfather, Professor George Challenger.
    Now there was a man who wasn’t frightened of arranging speculative scientific expeditions to exotic foreign countries in search of specimens of things that nobody else believed still
existed. Calum had heard stories from his father that George Challenger had, back in the 1880s, mounted an expedition to South America which had uncovered evidence that some prehistoric reptiles
still existed, in numbers large enough to sustain a stable population. The stories told of Professor Challenger bringing back a live pterodactyl and displaying it in London, to the disbelief of the
scientific and journalistic establishments. Calum had trawled through as many old newspapers from the time as he could locate, however, and had not found any reference to Professor Challenger or
live pterodactyls. You would have thought that live pterodactyls would have rated at least
some
mention.
    It was because of Professor George Challenger, and the stories that his father had told him, that Calum was obsessed with the possibility of extinct animals still alive in the world. Not just
prehistoric reptiles, but mammals, insects, fish . . . anything. That’s why his website was called
The Lost Worlds
– paying homage to the book
The Lost World
that the
writer Arthur Conan Doyle had written about his great-grandfather’s South American expedition – although most people took it to be a work of fiction rather than what it was: a
near-journalistic piece of non-fiction.
    His fingers clenched on the bottle as his memory flashed up a picture of the cover of the book
The Lost World
by Michael Crichton – a more recent piece of fiction, sequel to
Crichton’s previous novel
Jurassic Park
. Both had been made into films, which meant, as far as Calum was concerned, that his great-grandfather’s memory was being eroded away, bit
by precious bit.
    Which brought Calum back to the ground-floor storage area in the warehouse, where his great-grandfather’s boxes were stored. Hundreds of crates, left over from the various adventures that
Professor George Challenger had undertaken. Who knew