Millhaven Press liked “Monster in the Sand” (MITS) and “Six Birds and a Cat” (6BC) from my in-progress Cryptid series and included these two in its 4th annual Fierce Tales anthology: Lost Worlds (FTLW). FTLW has other authors’ stories; great fun & variety!
StoriesAmazing now has rights to the short story pairs. One tale features distant ancestors, scary cryptids, and mysterious anomalies. The other is unsettlingly connected and set in YOUR near future! Yikes! Each tale also features dramatic nonfiction research with references! There will be ten pairs, each about 8,000 words. These pairs act like time-flashed episodes in Ancient to Light (ATL), Book 2 of the Ancient Beacon series! Remember: Ancient of Genes is book 1. ATL is book 2, and Ancient to Eternal completes the trilogy. Three of ATL’s story pairs are story pairs are polished & (click) available for sale now at (click your preference) Barnes & Noble, this website’s store, and more choices! The ATL target release as a single volume (all 20 stories acting as 10 chapters) is Nov 2023. Book 3, Ancient to Eternal is merely outlined now, but expected in the summer of 2024. Get our “Reader-friend” newsletter for announcements and freebies!
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Enjoy a sample of MITS first, below the planned 3-anthology set list (A, B and C). 6BC is farther down this page. Again, please don’t confuse FTLW with my in-progress anthology. Millhaven simply published the first two in my Cryptid series along with tales by other fine authors, in its FTLW anthology.
The Nonfiction Accompaniment to “Monster in the Sand”
Sightings and Research: Giant Salamanders
by Dan Gallagher
We’ve all seen videos of crocodiles nabbing big animals at watering holes. Animals evolve – or survive eons unchanged – to fit a habitat’s niche, such as that of a large animal predator. Why would one of the most isolated habitats in North America be any different, not with crocodiles in mountain streams but with historically gargantuan salamanders lying in wait?
Salamanders have been carnivores with poisonous skin for a hundred sixty million years and their lengths have ranged from an inch to nine feet (Gao and Shubin 2003). All species regrow lost limbs and nerves, an ability that the Australian Regenerative Medicine Institute and other groups now race to harness for humans. They also regrow teeth: fifty to a hundred sharp spikes aimed inward toward the gullet. The upper row of teeth is in a bony structure in the palate; their jaws also have a row plus two urchin-like tooth clusters in front. Salamanders cannot slice prey, yet do attack animals larger than their mouths. They often rip prey apart in like manner to crocodiles: in groups, tearing in opposing directions.
A few species in Spain and Morocco stab needle-sharp ribs through neurotoxin glands into other animals. Only three species, in the Asian family Hynobiidae, have claws. Another family, Cryptobranchidae of China and North America, includes the largest known species. Chinese varieties reach up to five feet in length: In 2015, The People’s Daily published an online video (as cited in White 2015) showing a 114 pound specimen captured near Chongqing, China; it was determined to be two hundred years old. Might there be relatives – capable of subduing and eating humans – approaching ten feet long, living in wildernesses? Some fish and reptile species – all salamanders – grow throughout their lives. Might long life enable such truly threatening sizes?
Cryptobranchidae have been found in the Pacific Northwest, routinely reaching ten to thirteen inches in length. But there is a remote and mysterious region in Northern California known as the Trinity Alps, alleged home to both Sasquatch and vicious giant salamanders.
In a 2002 biography of entrepreneur-explorer Tom Slick, Loren Coleman chronicled significant sightings and noteworthy expeditions that motivated Slick and others to find giant salamanders in the Trinity Alps. Three area Native American tribes have legends of unseen migrations from spring egg-laying in the region’s deep lakes to sandy feeder streams. Swimming in spring and approaching burrows in fall are taboo. The earliest modern report was in the 1920s by attorney Frank L. Griffith. He claimed to have snagged a six-to-nine foot long brown salamander in a group of five. Griffith’s account appeared in newspapers in surrounding Siskiyou and Trinity counties. In 1939, herpetologist George S. Myers examined a thirty inch specimen caught by a Sacramento River fisher (Myers, 1951). In 1954, animal trainer Vern Harden saw a dozen, about eight feet long. Explorer-priest Bernard Hubbard and his brother, biologist John Hubbard, searched for these denizens from 1958 to 1959, intending to disprove the legends. Neither the Hubbards nor Slick found more than a previously unknown foot-long species. But these three men of sterling reputation did evaluate habitat adequacy and witness account credibility to conclude that the giants did exist (Coleman 2002). It is significant that most sightings were of groups, consistent with crocodile-like feeding.
Except for Myer’s 1939 find, which was seen by many and academically journaled but not long preserved, no one has returned a specimen of the beasts and no one has claimed to have seen them since 1959. But I offer a tale of one dark soul who found his just deserts… or perhaps they found their dessert in him.
References:
Coleman, Loren, 2002. Tom Slick: True Life Encounters in Cryptozoology, Linden Publishing, Inc. Fresno, CA. Print.
Gao, Ke-Qin; Shubin, Neil H. (27 March 2003). “Earliest known crown-group salamanders”. Nature. 422 (6930): 424–428. PMID 12660782. doi:10.1038/nature01491.
Myers, George S., 1951. “Asiatic Giant Salamander Caught in the Sacramento River and an Exotic Skink Near San Francisco,” Copeia, No. 2.
White, Daniel, Dec 2015. Time Newsfeed article & video http://time.com/4152884/giant-salamander-found-in-cave-china/?xid=time_socialflow_twitter. The link to the original video was also provided: http://fj.people.com.cn/n/2015/1211/c350395-27299369.html
Excerpt from near the climax of the main, fictional tale: “Monster in the Sand”
Author note: This story is not written in the usual “third-person omniscient” narration style. Rather, it uses the “unreliable narrator” style made famous by Edgar Allan Poe… and may be just as unsettling! Enjoy the sample:
“The sky darkened, but there were no clouds. My arm lay in the creek and I tried to use it to turn over and get up, but it wouldn’t work. It felt like the sand was crawling, scraping over me. You know the sand here isn’t like the sand in Afghanistan, at least where I had that traitor spray paint the glittery grains. It’s crystal there, like bright prisms splashing light and warmth back at you. Here, it’s just brown and burns like frostbite. Even the creek doesn’t glisten anymore, like the sand sucks all that’s good and living out of you. I’m sure it’s not me polluting the sand here; it stank to start with. Something was rotting, I think, just below the surface anyway. Probably El Cabro, processed all the way through salamander intestines. They’re carnivores, you know. Vicious and merciless and blood-hungry.”
Woah! Ya think?
What’s happening next to evil Mitch and the other bounty hunter? To complete this tale, 
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One of Two Nonfiction Accompaniments to “Six Birds and a Cat”
Sightings and Research: Thylacoleo carnifex
by Dan Gallagher
Imagine yourself in a hunting party trudging through a steamy, sunbeam-gashed jungle fifty thousand years ago when humans first inhabited Australia. You track a giant wombat from the forest edge, deep into the shadowy, light-splotched tangle beneath the canopy. Flies bite your sweaty skin. Huge spiders and millipedes rear up from saplings toward your halting reach. Abruptly the cacophonous calls of birds stop as several flee their perches. A few ripped green leaves fall from bouncing limbs twenty feet up. Immediately six gray forms, white-striped from spine to stomach, drop from above, surrounding your group. They crouch to leap, raising muscly hands and arms from hulking shoulders. Each extending one-inch finger claws and four-inch thumb claws, they launch as one, brandishing two-inch long, adz-like incisors and cleaver-like molars. Fast forward to the present day: it’s happening to you now!
What were these lion-like predators, not to be confused with dog-like Thylacines, before they became extinct… or merely rare? Studying non-mineralized fossils in a cave, researchers Samuel Arman and Gavin Prideaux (2016) discovered evidence of communal pack living among Australia’s largest marsupial carnivore species. Finds included bite marks of distinct individuals on prey bones and intimidatingly deep scratches in wood, even on cave walls! Its name was born out: Thylacis is Latin for pouch, leo lion, carnae flesh and fex slicer. Evidence from the cave showed social behavior—pack hunting—and a physique best suited to arboreal ambush.
Thylacoleo bones show a robust chest and long, powerful forelimbs: tree climbing and prey-disemboweling claws superior to any mammal ever discovered. This beast had beaver-like incisors capable of slicing chunks from live prey animals—including humans—and razor-edged molars for vivisecting bones. It had the strongest bite pressure of any mammal known (Musser, ed. 5 Sept 2015). Dr. Steven Wroe, University of Sydney, found Thylacoleo’s bite pressure to be at least equal to a lion’s (Amos 2005) by examining jaw muscle attachments and the width of the gap its jaw muscle filled between the skull and zygomatic process bone. Since its discovery in 1858, scientists have dated Thylacoleo bones older than a million years and as recent as forty-six thousand; truly an enduring species. But we cannot assume that the last Thylacoleo attack was millennia ago. Predator extinction has always coincided with that of its prey. The giant wombat Diprotodon, seems to have been Thylacoleo’s favorite prey, extinct twenty-five thousand years ago (Musser 30 Oct 2015). Armen and Prideaux found its bite marks on bones of extant species: Tasmanian devils, kangaroos wombats. So, most of Thylacoleo’s prey never disappeared!
Indeed, modern sightings and other evidence are both credible and numerous. European explorers, from the 1600s forward, distinguished between the “Tasmanian tiger” (Thylacine) and the “Queensland tiger” (Thylacoleo). A flurry of sightings through the 1940s and 1950s occurred in and just south of Queensland’s rainforest (Coleman & Clark, 1999, p. 206, 238). Thylacines had a uniform build, chest to rump, with a narrow, conical head, thin tail and stripes that descend from the back half of its spine to its stomach. In contrast, Thylacoleos are described with a much burlier chest and shoulders compared to the hindquarters, a wide and flattish head, thick tail, and stripes descending from the entire spine. Reports and evidence exist from all Australian states and New Guinea. But I found that twice the frequency of sightings, tracks and carcass gnaw marks originate from Queensland and south-coastal Australia as compared to other regions.
In 2014, Sue Smith of Diddillibah, Queensland photographed what appears to be a Thylacoleo in a field (Buderim Beast May 22, 2014). For decades, residents of southern Australia have reported and filmed both Thylacines and Thylacoleos. In a 1997 interview (“Animal X” s1, e11) New Norcia Monastery Abbot Placid and his secretary, Tony James, testified to seeing Thylacines throughout the 1980s and 90s…but some descriptions only fit Thylacoleos: Father Basil saw a dark gray animal with a flat-head, squarish-face, white stripes from its strong shoulders to its thick tail near the monastery. Some films and photos appear to show Thylacines. Yet the head and chest are too large in proportion to the rump and movements are cat-like, rather than similar to 1930s films of then-live Thylacines: The “Animal X” episode features Helen Barleyman’s video, taken near Perth in southwestern Australia, of an animal with a thicker chest than its rump, a thick tail and a flattish head. WhereLightMeetsDark.com, a cryptozoology website, offers the 1995 “Charleville Thylacine footage.” An anonymous elderly couple, with no obvious motive to fake, filmed an animal with Thylacoleo physique (Rehberg 2005). The website also excerpts a fall 2005 Royal Australian Air Force news interview with four RAAF airmen. They describe two nights of sightings and provided a photo of what appears to be a Queensland Thylacoleo, ears extended and reared up on its hind legs and strong tail.
If you had to venture into the territory of a pride of these clutching, ripping marsupial ‘big cats”, how secure would you feel? You would have to constantly scan behind, ahead, to both sides—even above you—for these superbly camouflaged predator packs. Two hardy souls realized they had no choice but to brave this horror, but did not emerge quite as they had hoped.
References:
Amos J., Science ed. 5 April, 2005. “Marsupial munch tops big biters”, BBC News
-. “Animal X” season 1, episode 11, starting at minute 14:00, 3/13/1997, Discovery Chanel
Anne Musser, ed. 5 Sept 2015. “Thylacoleo Carnifex” The Australian Museum website: https://australianmuseum.net.au/thylacoleo-carnifex
Anne Musser, ed. 30 Oct 2015. “Diprotodon optatum” The Australian Museum website: https://australianmuseum.net.au/diprotodon-optatum
Arman, S. D. & Prideaux, G. J. 2016. “Behaviour of the Pleistocene marsupial lion deduced from claw marks in a southwestern Australian cave”. Scientific Reports 2016/02/15 online. V.6 10.1038 Srep 21372. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep21372
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep21372#supplementary-information
-. “The Buderim Beast” May 22, 2014 with photo http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/topic/266755-beast-of-buderim/
Rehberg. 2005. “”Scherger Creature””, Where Light Meets Dark. http://www.wherelightmeetsdark.com.au/examining-the-evidence/thylacoleo-carnifex-(marsupial-lion)/scherger-creature/
Excerpt from Six Birds and a Cat
by Dan Gallagher
Twenty-one year-old Elizabeth Lloyd jostled with her brothers for the best snooping position at their parents’ bedroom door. She shushed Edward, two years her junior, and gently gripped thirteen year-old Michael’s mouth and tight Afro curls just as he began to protest his tertiary listening position. “I think they’re arguing about how to find Maeve,” she whispered, momentarily distracted by her sister’s picture that her father had hung in the hallway. Its title, Six Birds and a Cat, was barely visible in the lower right. Its nest of birds glowed warmly amid a dark and stylized misty wood, where a spectral brown cat waited in shadows.
Inside the large bedroom, white walls touted pictures of Ann and Keith in various outdoor adventures, like rappelling or with big game kills. These were interspersed with children’s paintings of flora, fauna and Boy and Girl Scout adventures. Ann tapped a photo of Keith and his men in forest camouflage beside an armored reconnaissance vehicle as she tried to deter her husband from his plan. “You’re fifty-six; not the Force Recon Marine of your youth. And she’s a long way from Baltimore.”
“I’m no weakling,” Keith protested, his English accent nearly gone after twenty years as a U.S. Marine. He gently dabbed tears from his and Ann’s puffy, glistening eyes and kissed her dark cheeks. “Ann, it’s too dangerous for you to go. Who would watch the kids?”
“Too dangerous?” she growled. “Who saved you when that bear charged and you fell onto the rocks unconscious in Canadian rapids?”
Keith stared sheepishly. “That took you and the kids, and I trained you all for years.”
“That’s my point,” she implored, tone hardening as she progressed. “We’re a team despite all the…You and I can do this. Liz is home from college for two months. Ed can help with Mike’s arm therapy. Mike can do most things for himself. You’re always diminishing his potential and crying over his inability to use ‘leftie’. Always controlling, over-protecting. What if Maeve is incommunicado for the same reason she flew to Australia… to get away from you?”
Keith glared at his wife, then lowered his head in a defeated expression. His tone lacked any hint of his old drive and energy. “More personal insults, Ann? That’s not how we were twenty-five years ago, not how we should be.”
“I want my husband back, and that won’t happen if you get eaten or injured in the Outback where she might not even be anyway. It’s primordial jungle there.”
“The private investigator is the best in Queensland, and he says they abandoned their bungalow, all supplies packed and—”
“I read the report. Take me or hire some bushtracker to help. She’ll probably resent even that if she’s found.”
“I have to show her I love her, that I could not give up. She has me wrong, and you know it. You admitted that, even with all your criticizing me for being a stereotypical Marine. She’s in danger from her shack-up guy, morally, maybe even physically—not to mention dangers in the Outback. I have to do this, while I still have some muscle and moxie left.”
A tear seeped from Ann’s eye as she embraced her husband. “I know. I’m sorry. The kids accept no responsibility for this fracturing and ‘modern values’ and leaving the church. So you’re the only one I can work on to make someone give-in and let resentments go. I’m sorry.”
“So I go, and you and the kids stay here. Yes?”
She stared a long moment, released her embrace, and turned toward the red drapes on the window. “Go,” she murmured. “Hire an adequate team. Get your baby brother’s help. Bart’s a paleo-zoologist and he’s dealt with dangerous animals before, meaner than the bears you faced.” END OF EXCERPT
What’s next for Maeve, Keith, Bart, and Lee? What will they encounter, and how will they survive…if they will? What of the rest of the family? To complete this tale, Experience these & other Adventures & nonfiction. Get Dan’s fiction & nonfiction at: Amazon, Barnes & Noble’s NOOK, online or in-store!
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