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‘I’m talking about the thing in the cage behind it.’
    There was silence in the room for a few moments, as they all tried to take in what they were seeing.
    ‘Eeuw!’ said Natalie finally.

CHAPTER three
    ‘W hat’s with the interest in giant rats?’ Natalie asked after she had stopped gagging at the photograph. ‘Aren’t
there any
nice
cryptids out there? You know, like ponies?’
    Calum shrugged. ‘I guess it actually started with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.’
    She recognized the name, but she wasn’t sure why. ‘The writer?’ she ventured.
    ‘Exactly.’ Calum seemed impressed that she knew that, which made her smile inwardly. Not outwardly, of course. That wouldn’t be cool.
    ‘He invented the character of Sherlock Holmes, the world’s greatest detective,’ Gecko pointed out helpfully. ‘Very popular in Brazil.’
    ‘Doyle had this habit of telling his audience about Sherlock Holmes’s more ordinary cases,’ Calum went on, ‘but mentioning in passing more bizarre ones that he never got
around to explaining. It was all a bit of a tease, I suppose. For instance, in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories there’s a reference to the affair of the Politician, the Lighthouse and the
Trained Cormorant. Fans have wondered for more than a hundred years what that case might have involved.’
    ‘Presumably it involved a politician, a lighthouse and a cormorant that had been trained to do something interesting,’ Tara said.
    Calum glared at her. ‘That’s a given, but what was the connection between them?’
    Tara shrugged. ‘Beats me. I’m not a writer.’
    ‘Anyway, in another of the stories Doyle mentions the case of the Giant Rat of Sumatra, and he goes on to say that it’s a case for which the world is not yet prepared. Again, fans of
Sherlock Holmes would far rather read about a bizarre giant rat than an ordinary theft or murder.’
    ‘Is there a giant rat in Sumatra?’ Gecko asked. ‘Oh, and by the way – where
is
Sumatra?’
    ‘Sumatra is an island in western Indonesia, and there
are
large rats on the island, although they’re only about the size of a house cat.’
    ‘In South America we have the capybara,’ Gecko offered. ‘It is also a rodent, and it is about the size of a large dog.’ His face fell somewhat. ‘The problem is that
it looks nothing like a rat. More like a small hippopotamus covered with hair.’
    Natalie grimaced at the thought.
    ‘Skeletons and fossils of giant rats have been discovered in places like East Timor,’ Calum went on. ‘They were about the size of a large dog too, although, judging by the
skulls, they looked a lot more like the rats we know about now. The odds are that they only died out about a thousand years ago – if they did die out. They might still be around, in isolated
locations.’
    ‘So has anyone actually reported
seeing
giant rats anywhere?’ Natalie persisted.
    Calum shook his head. ‘Not as such. I mean, there’s a photograph on the internet of a large dead rat in New York, but it’s almost certainly a tropical rat that had probably
been smuggled to America as a pet. It’s just that if there
are
unknown species out there, it’s more likely that they are going to be versions of things we already know about: new
kinds of deer, new kinds of spider, and so on. Rats are one of the most successful and widespread species on earth. Next to cockroaches they are nature’s best survivors. It seemed to me that
looking for some references to giant rats wouldn’t be a long shot. And then, of course, there’s the naked mole rat.’
    ‘Of course there is,’ Natalie said, suppressing a shudder. ‘There’s always the naked mole rat.’ She shook her head. ‘Actually – naked? Is that really
what it’s called?’
    ‘Oh yes,’ Calum confirmed.
    ‘And they’re called naked because why? People don’t dress them up, do they? They don’t dress themselves up?’
    ‘I’m guessing it’s because they don’t have hair,’ Tara