The Lonely Dead

'You could have checked earlier.'

'Could have, but didn't.'

Tom stopped walking. They were coming to a ridge, and he was momentarily unsure of which way to go. Henrickson took a few steps back and looked the other way. Tom realized the man was giving him a chance to work things out, to feel the way, and felt an absurd rush of gratitude. It had been a while since someone had trusted him, had been willing to think of him as someone who knew things. William and Lucy had grown old enough to see him as someone with faults, rather than qualities. Sarah knew him all too well. He was a given. The curse of the middle-aged man was knowing — or believing — that he'd told all he had to tell. Soon as you suspected that, you started wanting something, anything, to prove it wasn't so: and that's where the mistakes started, when the bad things happened.

'It's this direction,' he said, turning right.

'Feel the force, Luke.'

The next twenty minutes were hard going, and it was a while before either had spare breath to talk. Then the ground started heading down the other side of the ridge, with a much higher climb ahead. None of it looked familiar to him, but it seemed to be the way to go.

Tom glanced across at the reporter, who was walking alongside and matching him with easy strides. 'You've been looking for Bigfoot a long time, haven't you?'

'Surely have.'

'How come nobody believes in it?'

'Oh they do,' he said. 'Just, it's one of those things that's hard to make work, if you believe what we're supposed to believe. Nobody wants to look stupid, which is another way They work. You're prepared to look a little dumb once in a while, the world opens like an oyster.'

'So what is it?'

'What do you think?'

Tom shrugged. 'Some big ape, I guess. Something that lived here before humans arrived, then shrank back into the forests. There's plenty of space out here. Right?'

'Half right,' Henrickson said. 'Personally I believe they're the last surviving examples of Neanderthal man.'

Tom stopped, stared at him. 'What?'

Henrickson kept walking. 'Not a new theory, actually. Only problem is getting the detail to work. You know what archaeologists are like — or maybe you don't. Blah there's no evidence; blah the fossil record; blah my professor says it ain't so. Way I see it is this. You've got Neanderthal man, one of the best-adapted species the world has ever known. These guys had spears four hundred thousand years ago. They spread out over half the world, including into Europe — when that's no place you want to live. The ice age is still frosty, there's animals with very big teeth, and there is nothing, repeat, nothing, to make life easy for them. Yet they survive for hundreds of thousands of years. They have burial rituals. They have dentistry, which must have been horrible without Front Page to ease the wait. They make ornaments and jewellery and they have trade ties which spread the stuff over Europe. Cro-Magnon man eventually turns up — that's us — and for a while the two species sort of co-exist. Then the Neanderthals die out, bang, leaving about enough bones to fill a handbag. And apparently that's all she wrote.'

'So what did happen? According to you?'

'They never died out. There were never that many of them. They just got good at hiding.'

'Hiding? Where?'

'Two kinds of places. First is deep forests and mountains, out in northeastern Europe, Finland, the Himalayas — but also here in the good old US of A. The prehistorians claim there's no way Neanderthals could have got to North America. Theory is that man got here via a high northern land bridge, and that it wouldn't have been possible earlier than say fifteen thousand BC. I think that's underestimating the Neanderthals. No reason they couldn't have had little boats. They could have hugged the coast from Russia, managed to get across the big icy water down to the Northern Territories, then kept coming down the coast until they found somewhere habitable. Then, when we finally arrive in force, they head up into the forests. What better place? You've got thousands of square miles of wilderness that people still don't trouble much even now. Throughout Native American culture in this region there's some nice little hints. The Chinooks have tales about the 'ghost people' who lived in their own places, and who the tribe had a working relationship with. Then you got the 'animal people' of the Okanogans: the tribe lived right in these mountains and they believed there once were 'animals' that had culture before the 'people' — by which they meant humans — had got themselves together at all.'

'And the second place? The other place they hid?'

'Right under our noses. What's the most common type of legend all over Europe?'

'I don't know.' Tom also wasn't sure he was going the right way any more. They were past the bottom of the divide, and starting to head up again. The increasing harshness of the terrain was familiar, but nothing else, and the ground was getting steeper in most directions, so that didn't count for much. For the time being, he just kept going, and Henrickson kept on talking, with the smooth flow of someone who'd been over something many times in his head. And, if Tom was honest, with the confidence of someone who wasn't quite as bright as he thought.

'Fairies. Ogres. Elves. Trolls. All of which, according to me, are also examples of surviving Neanderthal man. Creatures that lived here before we did, and had their own strange customs. Who were common at first but then got more and more rare — until hardly anyone saw them any more. But we remember them. Language works in strange ways. You must have heard stuff like, in legends, 'There were giants here in those days'? I think 'giant' didn't mean 'big in body'. It meant that incomers found a previously existing population that was powerful and accomplished, like the Okanogans' animal people: a species that was culturally big.'

'But they died out.'

'Not completely. What else do we hear a lot about, all over the world? Ghosts. Shadowy presences. And what else? Aliens. The greys. Who, incidentally, seem to land their ships in forests quite often, which is a weird approach to aviation, don't you think? Greys, fairies, spooks are all ways of explaining strange stuff that we see every now and then. Ways of explaining away a whole species They claim died out, but which just faded into the background — and creeps around us, keeping out of our way.'

'But none of those things look remotely like Neanderthal man,' Tom said.

'No, for two reasons. First is tales swelling in the telling. Over hundreds, thousands of years, the legends take on their own weight, their own rules and trappings. Fairies look like this or that, elves got their cool green clothes, ghosts always got some sad story behind them. Second is that Neanderthal man has a way of clouding our minds.'

'What?'

'They reckon the species' throat and mouth maybe wasn't up to fully articulated speech. Yet they managed to do all this stuff, so obviously they could communicate, and in a way that mere body language and a system of hoots and grunts ain't going to pull off. My theory is that they communicated at least partly through telepathy. They still do, and even we do, now and then. Telepathy is just empathy turned up a whole lot. When they're confronted by something they think is dangerous, like us, they throw shapes into our heads. We see pictures in our own minds. They reflect our imaginations right back at us.'

'This is all nonsense,' Tom said, distractedly. 'I'm sorry, but I don't buy a word of it.'

'Think about our current endeavour. If I'm right, and we're looking for a Neanderthal, why does everyone who's seen Bigfoot say it's eight feet tall? They make us think they're tall, because tall is scary. And why do so many people — like you, Tom — report a vile smell? Why should they or any other creature go around smelling bad? No reason. They just make us think they do. It's another protection mechanism, one of the simplest in the book. They hide by putting smoke in our minds. That's why they're so hard to find. Nearer to civilization, we think we've seen a ghost. In a forest you don't expect to see something like that — except on a lonely road, where you've got your 'hitchhiker who isn't in the back seat after all' formulation — which is why you get Bigfoot instead. You see something closer to their true shape, because part of us has always known they're still out here.'