Doctor Fossil Read online

  Contents

  Prologue

  1 Math(s) Problems

  2 Ambushed!

  3 A Call for Help

  4 Hero Time

  5 The Sea of Sands

  6 Mind the Boom!

  7 Dino Danger

  8 The Crumpepper

  9 Relic Gorge

  10 Doctor Fossil

  11 A Villain Unveiled

  12 A Surprise in Store

  13 Eoraptor Scrap

  14 A Trap is Set

  15 The Hornets’ Nest

  16 An Empty Cell

  17 Marlon’s Plan

  18 The Battle of the Gorge

  19 The Demon Beast

  20 Gomez to the Rescue

  21 A Broken Heart

  22 No Rest for the Wicked

  23 One Step Closer

  Prologue

  Somewhere in a distant dimension, beneath a sky the colour of an ugly bruise, a tiny island of rock floated in a sea of poisonous cloud. At the centre of this barren Sky Prison stood its captive – the caped figure of Lord Tenoroc, overlord of all Super Villains, and terror of the Multiverse.

  Despite his grim surroundings, Tenoroc wore a wicked smile. His yellow eyes were fixed on a small, hexagonal disc hovering in the air in front of him.

  ‘Ah … yes …’

  Tenoroc studied the disc as it slowly twirled and flipped. Its gold edges framed the image of a man – or, at least, a man-like being. Instead of hair, his head was covered in feathery silver plumes. He had knobbly ridged skin like that of a reptile. A large amber jewel was set deep in the centre of his scrawny chest.

  ‘Doctor Fossil!’ hissed Tenoroc. ‘He with the awesome power to resurrect prehistoric monsters …’

  Tenoroc had taken his time selecting this particular Life Cell. He was determined to choose well. His collection of stolen Cells offered his only chance of escaping the Sky Prison. Each one contained the captured holographic form of a fearsome Super Villain. These black-hearted, super-powered scoundrels all recognized Tenoroc as their master. He had only to set them loose, back into the Multiverse, to employ their sinister talents.

  And soon, I shall release them all! thought Tenoroc. Then the Multiverse will crumble – and I will break free of this cursed dimension!

  For now, however, his powers were weakened. It would take all his strength to release the occupant of a single Cell.

  But Fossil will be enough! gloated Tenoroc. He alone will create chaos, at my command!

  With a wave of one bony hand, he began the process of setting loose his servant. The Life Cell drifted across to hover over a device that stood on a table of rock close by. This was Tenoroc’s Triple Sphere, the instrument through which he channelled his mystical powers – three stacked orbs of Star Crystal, topped and tailed with lethal spikes.

  ‘Time to bring to life …’ snarled Tenoroc, ‘A BRINGER OF LIFE!’

  He raised his hand once more, preparing to begin the final phase of the Super Villain’s reactivation …

  … when the drama of the moment was shattered by a fit of high-pitched giggling right behind him.

  ‘Tee-hee-hee, oh-ho-ho, ha-ha-ha!’

  Tenoroc turned, scowling.

  A gargoyle – an ugly winged beast carved from stone – perched nearby. Unlike most stone carvings, this one was unquestionably alive. The strangely cute little creature was holding its sides and waggling its stunted wings as it shook with laughter.

  ‘Oh … hee-hee … bring to life … ho-ho … a bringer of life … tee-hee … I … I see what you did there!’ it squealed. ‘You kill me, my Lord!’

  Tenoroc’s scowl deepened. ‘That can be arranged, Craw,’ he snarled.

  For once, his grovelling underling caught on quickly. Craw stopped laughing, gulped and hurriedly put on his best stony-serious face.

  Tenoroc turned back to the Triple Sphere. With another gesture, he sent the floating Life Cell drifting down into a socket in the device’s upper surface. The Cell flared with light.

  ‘Doctor Fossil …’ hissed Tenoroc, eyes blazing. He gave a dramatic sweep of his arm, fingers curled like claws. Life-force poured from the glowing Cell, forming swirls of luminous green in the upper orb of the Sphere. It trickled through to the larger central orb, which began to crackle and spit with intense white light.

  ‘… ARISE!’ bellowed Tenoroc.

  Relic Gorge was as silent as the grave.

  A grave, in fact, was exactly what the gorge was. The remote canyon, deep in the hot desert wilderness of the Sea of Sands, was the resting place of countless prehistoric beasts. They had died many millions of years ago. Their bones had been preserved in the gorge’s layered rock, as fossils.

  And fossils had brought fossil-hunters. The gorge’s present day landscape had all the features of a major scientific dig – wooden scaffolds, ramps and ladders, shovels and buckets and several neat, orderly excavations.

  What it didn’t have right now was any sign of activity. There wasn’t a soul around.

  But that was about to change.

  Sticking out from the rock face of one of the gorge’s walls was the strangest of all its fossils. It was the fossilized body of a man. A pinprick of fiery light suddenly pierced its stony surface. The light-spot quickly spread. Within seconds, the whole body was ablaze. With a final flare of light, it came alive.

  The reanimated man tumbled to the ground. Slowly, he got to his feet. He looked around, muttering.

  ‘What … in the name … of Natural Selection …?’

  He was an odd-looking individual, with a skeletal face, pitted skin and silvery, feather-like hair. His right hand was covered by a strange electro-mechanical glove. Thick yellow cables ran from its fingertips into the sleeve of his military shirt. He wore camo-combat trousers, kneepads and boots. His deep-set eyes were blood red.

  As he took in his surroundings, his face lit up.

  ‘I … I’m back!’ he gasped. ‘It’s my dig! Just as I left it!’

  He jumped down into the nearest and largest of the excavated pits, and dropped to his knees in front of the fossilized dinosaur skeleton that lay uncovered within it.

  ‘My beautiful specimens!’ he cried. ‘They’re still here! My work continues!’

  A moment later, his look of delight turned to one of terror, as a thunderous voice echoed around the gorge.

  ‘FOSSIL!’

  An unnatural bank of dark cloud hung directly above the gorge, in an otherwise clear blue sky. The form of a nightmarish face was visible within it. Doctor Fossil looked up to meet its angry stare.

  ‘Lord Tenoroc!’

  ‘I did not free you to pursue your scientific dreams!’ snarled Tenoroc’s scowling cloud-image.

  ‘How may I serve you, lord?’

  ‘Find and reanimate the ultimate demon beast!’ roared Tenoroc. ‘So I can spread chaos in the Multiverse!’

  As the echoes of his voice died away, Tenoroc’s image, and the clouds from which it had been formed, dissolved to nothingness.

  Doctor Fossil looked thoughtful. ‘The ultimate beast …’ he muttered to himself, getting to his feet. ‘Hmmm. That might take some time to find.’

  His red eyes settled once more on the fossilized skeleton that lay before him. A wicked grin spread across his face.

  ‘But you, Eoraptor, can start the chaos!’

  Cackling madly, Fossil threw back his arms and raised his face to the blue sky. A fiery amber glow flared beneath his shirt. Streams of crackling energy suddenly burst from his chest. They leapt at the dinosaur bones, like arcs of lightning.

  As Fossil’s wild laughter echoed around Relic Gorge, it was joined by a chorus of inhuman screeches, coming from within the pit …

  1

  Math(s) Pr
oblems

  Matt blew the dust from the top of the cardboard box, and set about untying its bindings. The string was so old it snapped as he tugged at the first knot. He folded back the box’s flaps and peered inside.

  ‘Hey, Marlon! Check this out!’

  In answer to Matt’s call, a tiny furry head popped up from a pile of dismantled gaslights in the corner of the storeroom. Marlon, Matt’s pet dwarf Tasmanian devil, came scampering across to see what new treasure his best friend had found.

  It was several months now since Matt and his parents, Harry and Meg Hatter, had moved from New York to London, to help his grandfather run the famous Notting Hill Coronet movie theatre. Even so, Matt’s explorations of his new home continued to turn up exciting surprises on a daily basis. The theatre’s ground floor storeroom was his favourite hunting ground. The Hatters who had run the Coronet over the last century – Matt’s Grandpa Alfred and late Great-grandpa Samuel – had used the little room to stash away every bit of out-dated equipment or movie memorabilia from their time in charge. For a movie-mad teen like Matt the junk-crammed space was a paradise.

  Marlon chittered excitedly as he watched Matt remove a dozen round metal film canisters, one at a time, from inside the box.

  ‘Pandora … Cyber Racer … Werewolf King …’ Matt’s eyes sparkled as he read each faded label in turn. ‘These are classics, Marlon, from way back! Even I haven’t seen most of the movies in here! How cool would it be if we could get Dad to show them on Screen One, just for us?’

  Marlon’s squeal implied it would be very cool.

  ‘Or maybe …’ Matt looked across to where an antique film projector lay among the clutter. ‘… maybe if I twist his arm, he might get that old thing running again.’ Harry Hatter loved tinkering with anything mechanical. ‘We could project these onto our bedroom wall!’

  Marlon chittered his approval.

  ‘We just need to see if we can catch Dad when he’s in a really good mood …’

  ‘MATTHEW LUKE HATTER!’

  The holler of a voice along the corridor outside made Matt wince.

  ‘Which isn’t now, by the sounds of it,’ he told Marlon. ‘Dad using my full name always spells trouble.’ He quickly replaced the film canisters, then made his way towards the doorway. ‘You keep looking around, little buddy. I’ll go see what I’ve done wrong this time …’

  Matt had left his skateboard leaning up outside the storeroom door. With a practised flick of his foot, he flipped it up-and-over on to its wheels. He stepped on and kicked off.

  ‘Coming, Dad!’

  One of the many things Matt loved about the Coronet was the theatre’s long stretches of smoothly carpeted floor – perfect for indoor skating. There were some neat spots for jumps, too. The three-step drop into the lobby, up ahead, was one of Matt’s favourites.

  Let’s give it plenty of air, thought Matt to himself, building speed. It was only as he kicked off from the top step that he noticed the giant figure in the centre of the lobby. It was a cardboard cutout of the half-human, half-robot hero of the latest sci-fi blockbuster, Robo-Enforcer. It was standing right where Matt had intended to land.

  ‘Whooooaaaahh!’

  Matt, on his airborne skateboard, sailed straight into the cardboard cyborg. The resulting wipe-out was even more spectacular than his jump. Cardboard body parts flew in all directions.

  Matt slowly picked himself up – to find that he was now wearing Robo-Enforcer’s top half around his neck. His head had burst right through the cyborg’s armoured chest.

  ‘Matt! Are you crazy?’

  His mum was standing by the ticket counter, looking at his handiwork in disbelief. His dad was beside her. Matt’s heart sank. A double-parent-talking-to was never good news. It wasn’t going to help that he had just trashed the lobby display.

  ‘But … Dad used my middle name!’ he protested. ‘He only does that when I’m in big trouble. So … so I thought I should come quickly.’

  His dad shook his head. ‘You aren’t in “big trouble”!’ he said cheerily. Then his smile faltered. ‘Or at least you weren’t – until you destroyed Robo-Enforcer …’

  ‘Matthew.’ Matt’s mum held up a typewritten document, the sight of which made his spirits sink even further. ‘We’re concerned about your grades.’

  ‘Ah. My report card.’ Matt looked shifty. ‘Didn’t realize it had arrived.’ Judging by his mum’s ‘concerned’ look, Matt guessed his school report was every bit as bad as he’d feared. Or worse. He began to retreat, moving robot-style, towards the lobby steps.

  ‘Good-bye, ci-ti-zens!’ droned Matt, swinging his cyborg arms. ‘I have an e-mer-gen-cy to a-ttend to.’

  His mum was having none of it.

  ‘Power down, Robo-Enforcer!’ she said with a wry smile.

  Matt ground to a robotic halt, as if someone had pulled his plug.

  ‘Matt,’ said his dad patiently, ‘we’re most concerned about maths.’

  Matt pulled a face. ‘Math-sss?’ he echoed. He had been having enough trouble getting to grips with how his new English classmates talked – like being invited to play “football at break”, instead of soccer at recess. He could do without his dad falling back into his old English ways. ‘Back in New York, there was no “s” in “math”!’ Matt looked to his mum – a born-and-bred New Yorker – for support.

  ‘As far as we’re concerned,’ smiled his dad, pointing at the report card, ‘there’s no “D” in it either, Mister!’

  ‘Which is why …’ his mum followed up ‘… Mrs Crumpepper is on her way over – to tutor you.’

  Matt’s mood hit rock bottom. His hopes of spending the evening happily rooting around the storeroom with Marlon evaporated.

  ‘Not The Crumpepper!’

  Mrs Crumpepper was an old friend of Matt’s grandfather. His dad had first suggested her as a home tutor because he had occasionally been taught by her himself, when he was a boy. Which makes her about a billion years old, thought Matt.

  ‘All I ever do is study!’ he groaned. ‘It’s like I’m …’ He resumed his robot impersonation, ‘… Ro-bo-Stu-dent!’

  His dad gave him a look. ‘Robo-Student would have got better grades!’

  Matt may not have been top of the class lately, but he was smart enough to know when there was no point in arguing. He could usually talk his dad round, but even an ultra-tough law-enforcing cyborg would have been no match for his mum once she’d made up her mind. It looked like he had an appointment with The Crumpepper, whether he liked it or not.

  Sulkily, Matt extracted himself from the remains of Robo-Enforcer, retrieved his skateboard and trudged off to tell Marlon the bad news.

  2

  Ambushed!

  Captain Yasser of the Sultan’s Guard had led camel caravans across the Sea of Sands many times before. For some reason, however, this particular desert trek was giving him the jitters.

  The captain put his nervousness down to the value of his cargo. Between them, his team of six triple-humped camels were carrying more of the Sultan’s worldly wealth than Yasser cared to think about.

  But he couldn’t help feeling there was something else – something about this particular region of the desert. For the last mile or so, he’d had the unsettling sense of being watched. And something was definitely spooking the camels. Out of the corner of an eye, Yasser caught a slight movement.

  ‘Wha–?’

  The lead camel had seen it, too. With a snort of alarm, it reared up. ‘Easy now, my precious,’ said Yasser, keeping tight hold of the beast’s bridle. He stroked the camel’s side soothingly. ‘Don’t worry. It’s probably just a desert rat.’

  Nevertheless, Yasser reached for his scimitar, and drew the broad, curving blade from its sheath.

  A strange chirruping animal call came from somewhere away to his right. Another answered from behind him.

  ‘Huh?’

  Yasser spun round, sword at the ready …

  … but completely unprepared for the te
rrifying sight that met his eyes.

  He barely had time to scream before the nightmarish beasts were upon him.

  3

  A Call for Help

  Matt climbed the last few steps of the spiral staircase to his top-floor turret bedroom. He slumped on the end of his bed and let out a sigh. Marlon hopped up beside him. The little Tasmanian devil gazed up at his friend with concern.

  ‘I can’t believe they’re sending over The Crumpepper to tutor me,’ said Matt glumly.

  Marlon chittered sympathetically.

  It seemed totally unfair to Matt that his parents were hassling him about his report. It was true, of course, that his grades had slipped a little since he’d moved to London. It had taken time for him to find his feet at his new school, make new friends, get used to the English way of doing and saying things, and none of this had helped his schoolwork.

  Plus I’ve got the Multiverse to take care of, thought Matt.

  The countless surprises of the Coronet’s storeroom were nothing compared to the one mind-blowing, life-changing discovery Matt had made on his very first day in his new home. The Coronet, he had been astonished to find, concealed a gateway to another dimension. This was the Multiverse – a place of wonder, danger and adventure.

  Sadly, it was also a place where the Coronet was spoken of with dread. A century ago, in the days of Matt’s great-grandfather, Samuel Hatter, the Coronet’s Screen Two had shown classic adventure and monster movies daily. Samuel had never dreamt that by screening these movies, he was giving the Super Villains they featured a chance to escape, through the inter-dimensional portal, into the Multiverse. Here, the movie villains assumed physical form, becoming real beings. They had brought chaos to the Multiverse’s twelve realms.

  But the coming of the Hatter Heroes had turned the evil tide. Samuel Hatter had eventually discovered the catastrophic consequences of his Screen Two showings. Vowing to make amends, he had entered the Multiverse himself, and dedicated his life to capturing the marauding Super Villains, one by one. His son – Matt’s Grandpa Alfred – had continued his work, until each and every Coronet Villain was safely imprisoned in a Life Cell.