The Anomaly Page 16

  But what if there’s no Thing? What if the situation is actually as bad as it looks? Or worse?

  “Shit, Ken,” I said. “I’m sorry I got us into this.”

  “Don’t be a twat. And look, I’m only being a producer and coming up with a plan B for the sake of it. Feather will come back. And the longer she’s gone, the better.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Because it implies she’s hooked up with Dylan and gone with him to get help. Yesterday she was only gone a few hours, right? Because he wasn’t there, and so she came back. If she’s not back in a couple hours it’s because it’s all in hand and stuff’s happening. Or that’s what I’m telling myself.”

  “Is it working?”

  “Fuck off. By the way—are you aware you keep scratching the back of your neck?”

  “What?”

  He pointed at my hand—and only then did I realize that yes, I was scratching there again. And had been for a while.

  “You were doing it on your arm earlier, too. I’ve seen Molly scratching as well.”

  “I feel kinda itchy. Probably dried sweat.”

  “Except you’ve had two swims in that pool. In fact, you and Molly were the only ones who had one in the night, right? When the water looked cloudy, according to you. And now you and her are the people scratching like cats with fleas.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Just pointing out a correlation, mate.”

  I wasn’t at all sure what he was getting at. My headache was getting steadily worse, and my mouth felt very dry.

  “Hey, guys,” Molly called. She sounded a long way away. “There’s an opening back here.”

  Chapter

  30

  The room was deeper than I’d realized, and it was twenty yards before we got to Molly. The back wall hadn’t been shaped and smoothed and right-angled like the others, and looked like a remnant of an originally natural space, a cavern deep underground. In the middle was an opening. It, too, looked natural, a crack in the rock, tapering sharply at the top and bottom and about two, three feet wide in the middle.

  Molly shone the light directly into it, revealing a rough, slanting, and narrow passage beyond.

  “Now we’re talking,” Ken said.

  “Should we tell the others before we check it out?”

  “No,” I said. “We’re here now. And we need someone holding the fort back there for when Feather gets back. If it looks like this is going a significant distance, someone can go fetch them. Bummer we didn’t bring a headlamp, though.”

  Molly handed me the light. I stepped up into the “passage,” which in reality—this became clear when you got into it—was a very ragged fissure. Despite the hundreds of thousands of man-hours spent chiseling and shaping nearby, it seemed like nobody had done anything to this part.

  “It gets kind of tight up ahead,” I said.

  “What are you implying?” Ken asked.

  “Nothing, you ass. Just I’m wondering why they never worked it, made it like the other passages.”

  “Is it possible it happened after this place was built? Earthquake damage?”

  “Maybe. I’m not a geologist. But I’m thinking not, because the end wall was uneven, too. It’s more as though this thing was already here when they built the rest of it, and they decided to preserve its natural state for some reason.”

  I moved along the fissure, carefully. The floor was very uneven and had cracks big enough to twist your ankle in. Once I was a few feet down Ken followed, with Molly at the back.

  After a while the crack jagged to the left, and got narrower. Narrow enough, in fact, that we had to move sideways along it. And then stoop.

  “Are we even sure this is going anywhere?” Molly’s voice was tight. “By which I mean anywhere we want to be?”

  After another twenty feet I stopped. The top of the crevice was getting lower and lower, though thankfully the smell had abated. “We’re nearly going to have to crawl through this next part,” I said. “If anybody wants to bail…this is probably the moment.”

  “Just keep going,” Ken said.

  I hung the light around my neck and lowered to a crouch. Took a deep breath. I don’t have a particular problem with confined spaces, but this was very confined indeed. A low, insistent voice in the back of my mind wasn’t happy, and was toying with the idea of panicking. If Molly managed to make it through this section, she was a hell of a lot braver than me. Assuming this wasn’t merely the beginning of the end of the fissure, of course, the point where it dwindled to nothing. The light wasn’t showing far enough to tell.

  We kept going. I thought there was a slight upward trajectory, though not one that would make a difference. A matter of degrees. To get to the surface at this incline would take several hundred miles. I moved one foot forward, bracing against the walls to the side and above my head, then shifted the other foot after it. Repeat.

  It was very slow and tiring, the space thick with the sound of our panting and grunts of exertion. The only upside was that we were now out of range of the smell from the room. The crevice smelled like dust, and was like being in a coffin made of rock.

  We progressed like this for ten minutes. I was close to giving up but then there was space over my head again. Room to move my elbows, too.

  This caught me by surprise and for another yard or so I continued to shuffle, crabbed down in a crouch. Then I straightened, cautiously.

  “Are we there yet?” Ken’s voice was muffled.

  “I don’t know. But you can stand up, at least.”

  “Thank Christ for that.”

  I held the light so he could see his way as he scrambled from the fissure, like an ungainly and bad-tempered champagne cork. He was red in the face and sweaty. Molly emerged a minute later with a little more grace but didn’t look like she’d enjoyed the experience even a little bit.

  “Okay,” Ken said. “You may now turn and reveal the express elevator full of beer, which the temple-builders of antiquity thoughtfully installed for our convenience.”

  I turned and directed the light into the inky darkness.

  We were in a long space, maybe fifteen feet wide. The sloping ceiling was a couple of yards above our heads. The floor was still uneven but looked like it had been given at least some attention to level it out a little. It was impossible to tell how far the cavern went, because the light wasn’t strong enough to penetrate more than twenty feet.

  The wall on the right was rough, natural. On the left it was smooth and flat—but it was hard to tell whether it had originally been that way. And within a moment of turning your attention to it, you didn’t care.

  “Fuck…me,” Ken said.

  This wall was covered in paintings.

  They started almost immediately after the fissure widened into this bigger space. They were large, each a couple of feet tall, and rendered in a loose style. Some had been minimally shaded and filled in, but most were confined to simple flowing lines evoking shape and movement, like sketches.

  I couldn’t tell what the first was supposed to be, but the second looked a lot like a bird, or perhaps an insect, as it seemed to have more than two legs—though it was hard to be sure because of the degree of stylization.

  Then there was something that looked like a condor or eagle, though the head was oddly shaped. The next was a rodent or other small mammal.

  And they kept on going. There were lines in what looked like charcoal, others that were white, like a chalk. Completely protected from the elements and the sun, they were as bright and strong as the day they’d been put there.

  I turned and redirected the light, slowly revealing a line of more paintings stretching into the darkness. If you’d come upon this in a cave in France or Germany you would have no doubt what you were seeing. The resemblance to the kind of work that had been discovered in the caves of Lascaux—paintings made nearly twenty thousand years ago—was striking and undeniable.

  We stood staring at it for sever
al minutes. I honestly didn’t know what to say. Ken, naturally, did.

  “Nolan, this is Neanderthal. And I mean that in a good way.”

  “Not Neanderthal. Upper Paleolithic. But it can’t be. That era of Homo sapiens were never in North America, or barely. Certainly not the cave-painting kind.”

  “Says who?”

  “Literally everyone. Even the woo-woo crowd doesn’t go there. There’s never been the slightest evidence.”

  “Well, not until we just found a huge great wall of Neolithic cave paintings.”

  “Kincaid never made it this far?” Molly said.

  “No,” I said. “They bailed at the beginning of the room that smells bad.”

  “This is immense,” Ken said. “We are in new and uncharted territory, Nolan. The first white people ever to see this. Maybe the first people since the stone age. This rewrites the entire history of fucking everything. You know it does.”

  “Yeah,” Molly said, her pretty, open face tilted back to look up at the pictures. “It’s going to be a bummer if we end up dying without being able to tell anyone.”

  Ken and I turned to stare at her.

  “Sorry,” she muttered.

  We progressed along the line of paintings, looking at each in turn. They got rougher and more hurried as the line progressed, as though this project hadn’t been finished, or the artist or artists had run out of time. There were further birds, bison, a fish, something that looked like a big cat with long teeth, a spiderlike creature with legs that were wavy and all pointing in the same direction. Others were harder to identify. Maybe a wolf. A mammoth, possibly. Something like a species of antelope, but on its rear legs, the front ones much shorter than the back.

  “Nolan,” Molly said. “Check that one out.”

  At first glance it looked like another kind of deer, though much bulkier, again portrayed either up on hind legs or frozen in midleap. When I moved the light, however, I got what she was getting at. It clearly wasn’t a deer, when you looked properly. It was bulky and powerful across the back. Its head was bulbous and very large.

  “Looks like one of the things on that Newspaper Rock in Utah you were telling Gemma about.”

  “It does. Which makes this further proof of the idea of the Hopi braves making pilgrimages here. And also maybe that they’d been happening for…a really, really long time.”

  “And what’s after it,” Ken said. “What’s that about?”

  There was no picture to the right of the bear-like creature, at least not in the sense we’d become accustomed to. Instead there was a patch of black, ochre, and white handprints. Most were left hands, suggesting the painters were right-handed, but I saw one right hand, too.

  “Humans,” I said. “All the animals were illustrated. But when it came to humankind, they made handprints instead. Maybe like a signature. To say ‘We’re different. We’re the animal that paints, instead of being painted. And we made this stuff, and this place.’ The question is—how long ago?”

  Lascaux has been dated to around 15,000 BC. There are other illustrated Paleolithic caves twice that old, however, and recent discoveries suggesting more basic Neanderthal decoration of underground locations as long as 170,000 years back.

  “Except, there’s a human,” Ken said. “Huge one.”

  I was turning to shine the flashlight to see what he was talking about when the illumination it provided suddenly dimmed to a low, dirty yellow. And flickered.

  And then went out.

  From the files of Nolan Moore:

  CAVE PAINTING FROM LASCAUX

  Chapter

  31

  I flipped the switch on the flashlight back and forth. All this achieved was another dim, dying flicker as the batteries gave their last. Then blackness again.

  “Bollocks,” Ken said.

  “Anybody got another light?”

  “Nope,” Molly said. Her voice was flat.

  I was waiting for my eyes to adjust, but realized this was dumb. These weren’t low-light conditions. These were conditions of no light at all. No sunlight had fallen here, ever. None. Since the dawn of time. All my eyes could come up with was sparkles in the blackness as my brain tried to make sense and patterns from random retinal firings.

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay. This is…not great, but it could be worse.”

  “I’m looking forward to hearing how, Nolan.”

  “We know where we are, and how to get back.”

  “Fuck,” Molly said, suddenly and very loudly. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

  I’d never heard her swear before. The words rebounded in the cavern and then it was very quiet again.

  “It’s all right, love,” Ken said. “Nolan’s right. All we’ve got to do is retrace our steps.”

  I reached out in the dark and found Molly’s shoulder. It was shaking. “It’s going to be fine, Moll.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Nolan,” Ken said. “You’re going at the front. Moll, stand behind him and grab hold of that ridiculous shirt. By the way, Nolan, have I ever mentioned that you look like someone playing Hamlet in amateur dramatics in that shirt? Or like a waiter in a really gay restaurant? In 1982?”

  “Several times. You even emailed me to that effect once.”

  “Did I? I don’t remember that.”

  “You may have been drunk. You misspelled your own name.”

  “I like the shirt,” Molly said quietly.

  “There you go,” I said, relieved that our little double act seemed to have achieved its goal. Or what I assumed had been its goal—it’s possible that Ken really had just wanted to be rude about my attire. “And either way it’s what I’m wearing, so yes, Moll, grab the back of it.”

  “And don’t be alarmed if you feel a hand on your shoulder,” Ken told her. “For it shall be mine.”

  We got in a line and readied ourselves.

  I steered us toward the side opposite the paintings, so we didn’t mess them up by running our hands along them while following the wall. I walked slowly and steadily, knees bent, sweeping each foot out to tap the way with my heel and check for unevenness, lowering the front of the foot, then repeating with the other side. This mode of locomotion came to me without thinking, and it took a moment to remember where from. For my birthday one year Kristy got me a couple of months’ private Tai Chi classes. I’m not sure why—I’d never expressed an interest—but I did kind of enjoy it. I didn’t practice enough in between sessions to improve much, though it did change the way I moved. And here I was, a decade later, walking that Tai Chi walk, in a cavern, in the pitch dark, and not falling over or banging into anything, like a total stealth ninja.

  I was just glad that Ken couldn’t see me doing it.

  It took ten minutes to get the length of the cavern. Ken swore quietly, twice, presumably having stubbed his toe. Molly said nothing but kept a firm grip on the back of my shirt. The wall finally started to bear in toward me and I used my left arm to keep myself at a consistent distance while flapping out with my right, trying to find the end wall. When I felt it under my fingers I stopped moving.

  “Okay,” I said. “Time to shuffle to the right and find that passage. Then the fun part starts.”

  “Christ,” Molly muttered.

  It took only a minute to find the fissure. I felt around the opening with my hands, then stepped up into it while crouching. I did this slowly and carefully but still managed to crack myself on the top of the head.

  When I was properly inside I paused.

  I hadn’t enjoyed this part before. Having no light shouldn’t make it worse. Not rationally, anyhow. I’d feel my way. Probably I’d end up scraping my elbows or knocking my head, but otherwise, what difference?

  All the difference in the world. In the same way that anybody can walk along a single line of bricks, but if you build that single line up to a hundred feet high, then almost everyone will fall off within a few feet. It’s no harder, for the body anyway. But for the brain…that’s diff
erent. The panicking, consequence-aware mind will interfere with the body’s innate ability to balance.

  Pushing yourself into a confined space in pitch blackness is similar. The mind has a whole lot of things to say about the prospect, and none of them are “Bring it on.”

  I got myself into as tight a crouch as possible. I’d already reconciled myself to bangs and knocks—and tried to relax myself about the prospect. I did as I had when coming in the other direction, inching each foot forward, using hands and elbows to brace against the passage walls. I kept my eyes shut, against the retinas’ attempts to interpret sensory deprivation in misleading ways. A couple of inches at a time.

  I focused on the sensations in my fingers and feet, the feel of the rock, the smell of the dust. Every step was hard, but thank God we were going back rather than forward. I knew it would end. If you’re patient, one step at a time will take you as far as you need to go. I submerged myself in the process, blanking out everything else.

  But then I became aware of fast, uncontrolled panting behind me. “Moll? Are you okay?”

  “I can’t do this. I can’t. I have to get out.”

  “That’s what we’re doing, love,” Ken said. “Getting out. Just keep going.”

  “I can’t. I can’t do this. We’re going to die down here and that’s okay, but I can’t die in this tunnel. I can’t die here. I have to get out. I HAVE TO GET OUT.”

  I stopped trying to move forward. “Moll. Shout it again. Shout it one more time. Get it out.”

  “I…” But her voice cracked, and she started crying.

  “Moll, come closer. Come right up behind me.”

  She shuffled up. I felt her forehead on my back. It was slick with sweat, and her entire body was trembling.

  “You’re wrong, Moll. We are going to get out of here.”