The Anomaly Read online

  “I’ve done all but two,” Pierre said. He turned and pointed to doorways at the nine and twelve o’clock positions.

  “All right, so job number one is we do that.” He peered at Gemma. “You all right, love?”

  Gemma was crouched with her head over her knees. “I’m okay,” she said. “Just nauseous. It’s been coming on awhile, but whoa, suddenly it’s a lot worse.”

  “We need to eat,” Molly said. She grabbed her backpack—which had become the de facto storage place for sustenance—and took out the carefully wrapped final scraps of sandwich. “I know there’s not much left but there’s no point saving it for when we’re dead.”

  She unwrapped each fragment in turn, handing one to Ken first, probably unconscious of the way the traditional hierarchies were still operating. Then one to Pierre. Broke her little chunk in two, and handed half to me.

  “My turn,” she said. “Kind of wishing you hadn’t been so gallant with yours yesterday, to be honest.”

  “Trust me. Henceforth hungry womenfolk will have to pry the crumbs out of my cold, dead hands.”

  She held out the last piece to Gemma, who accepted it without enthusiasm. We all took our bites, chewing slowly. The bread was even drier and harder now. The cheese tasted exactly like plastic. Swallowing wasn’t easy.

  “Lovely,” Ken said. “My compliments to the chef.” He hesitated a beat as he remembered that the chef had been Dylan. “So. Moll and me will go check that passage, and Pierre and Gemma look at the other.”

  “What am I doing?”

  “Going down the passage to the stone ball.”

  “Why?”

  He lowered his voice. “Because I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Psychobitch is still on the other side, listening. And so you should go down there and talk to her. See if you can get her to respond. You’re the only person she seems to take seriously, Nolan. Get something out of her. Find out what the fuck’s going on and if there’s anything we can do about it.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Do better than that, mate.” He looked at me seriously. “This would be the moment for your very best work.”

  Chapter

  37

  I watched the others head off. It occurred to me, too late, that maybe they should all go together, so they only used one light. But then I realized it would take twice as long that way, so probably no power would be saved.

  My mental processes felt like they had lead boots on, wading through thought-treacle: with the exception of sudden sharp, disconnected ideas that burst out of the fog like lightning and just as quickly disappeared. For a rare moment I experienced my mind as fully part of my body, and inhabited the exhausted, arid sluggishness of the whole.

  I ran my tongue around my mouth and across my teeth but it didn’t help. It just made my gums feel big.

  I hauled myself to my feet, turned off the light, and walked toward the big stone ball.

  It was very dark. Perfectly dark. And perfectly quiet. I felt my way to the ball and sat down next to it, hearing nothing but the soft sound of breath going in and out of my body.

  Nothing from the other side of the ball, either. I didn’t actually think Feather would still be there. Her farewell had sounded final, and she’d seemed confident that she’d heard enough to confirm that the situation on our side—whatever it might be—was heading in the direction that she, and whoever she was aligned with, wished it to go. Assuming there genuinely was anybody else involved, of course.

  “It’s uncertainty that’ll kill you,” I said after a long pause. My voice sounded strange in the silence. Tired, lonely—the way it sounds inside your head when you’re lying on your bed in the dark, reliving old mistakes. “Not hope, like everyone says. If you can blindly hope, that’s what you’ll do. But if you don’t know…That’s poisonous. It’s impossible to commit. You’re unable to throw yourself in one direction and follow that path. I have no idea why I’m even saying this.”

  No sound from the other side.

  I didn’t know what Ken thought I was going to be able to find to say. There didn’t seem to be anything worth articulating. But I decided I may as well think aloud, try to talk myself through the story, as I had often done years ago: pacing around the study in the house Kristy and I shared, walking miles along the beach promenade, wandering the backstreets of Santa Monica and Venice Beach—talking aloud, coaxing a movie plot to emerge by forcing it to manifest in words.

  “You’re not dumb, so I’m going to flat-out admit that Ken thinks I might be able to find something to say that’ll change your behavior. I think that’s unlikely. You’re locked on course. The only question is what that course is. And why you won’t simply tell us. You said you weren’t allowed. But if we’re never going to make it out of here, who cares what we know? Who’s going to find out? Corpses keep secrets very well.”

  I thought about that for a moment. “But there’s you, I suppose. You’d know you’d done something you weren’t supposed to. Which could imply that you’re worried someone would get that information out of you sooner or later. So…fear of future punishment is a possibility. Or else you know yourself well enough to understand that guilt would be bad for you. That it would eat away. Undermine whatever you’d achieved here, even if it stayed your dirty little secret forever. Yeah. I think that’s it. And God knows, I get that.”

  There was no sound from up the corridor, nor any sign of light. I guessed the others were still exploring the passages, being thorough. And slow, probably, moving sluggishly, supporting themselves with a hand on the wall, blinking in the darkness. Either that or they’d all been sliced into slivers by some huge swinging ax-knife and I was here all alone, talking to a woman who wasn’t even there.

  “I broke my life in half that way,” I said. “By not wanting to have a secret. Kristy…turned out she was having an affair.”

  Only when the words were out of my mouth did I realize how seldom I’d articulated the fact out loud. To Ken, yes. To a couple of mutual friends who needed an explanation for why Kristy + Nolan suddenly wasn’t a thing anymore. To most, I just shrugged and said, you know, shit happens.

  “I’m not even sure it was that big a deal. I mean, of course it’s something of a deal. You’re married to someone and they become intimate with someone behind your back, that’s a deal. But a big deal, once you get past the betrayal and hurt pride and all that crap? Depends. Tying two people together for life is a hell of an ask. People change, inevitably. Even if most of the time you walk in the same direction, there’ll be times when one of you wanders off the path. I wouldn’t even have known about it if a friend of hers hadn’t emailed me. And after I got that note…I could have let it go. Trusted that it was part of life’s mysterious process. I’m not dumb. I could guess what the affair involved. Afternoons in motels. A feeling of connection and engagement and gleeful surprise. The kind of guilt that bonds. Sex that felt fresh and new and real. The promise of different horizons, however illusory. The fever dream of novelty. Secrets. Liking the smell of someone’s skin.

  “So there would be all that, of course. But for all I knew…Well, the guy she was seeing was kind of a friend of mine. He’s smart, funny, good-looking. He’s talented and committed. He gives a shit about the environment. For all I knew, he could actually have been the one for her, right? In the grand scheme of things I could just have been a step on Kristy’s path to him. The old love isn’t necessarily better or more important or real than the new one. He could have been where she was destined to be. Who knows?

  “So I didn’t know what it meant, and that’s where uncertainty kills you. I could have chosen to hope it’d all turn out okay. I wanted to believe that. But I didn’t know. I couldn’t be sure this was merely a tough stretch of road, and not the end of it. The guy I am, two years later…Now, I would have the sense to let the thing run its course and see what happened. We loved each other. I’m pretty sure that would have won in the end. And if it didn’t, well, that would have proved or at le
ast suggested we didn’t love each other enough anymore, which would have been information we could have done something with. But instead…instead, one night, after a couple too many drinks, I stopped by her friend’s house.

  “My only intention was to double-check the source. Make sure that she was sure. And she let me in and we talked, and yes, she was certain, and a couple things she said convinced me, too. Things I should have noticed myself, but…My mind was always on some script or other, and after a while you just take things for granted. And I know what you’re thinking—an hour later, me and the friend are having sex on the couch, right? But no. We had a couple glasses of wine, agreed that life sucks sometimes, and I got a cab home.

  “Couple days later over dinner I asked Kristy if there was something going on. She froze. She asked why I was asking. I said I had a weird feeling, had picked up on a couple things. She admitted to the affair.

  “There was a lot of talking that night, and straight through to the next day. The kind of talking that makes you think, when you’re done, that you don’t ever want to talk again. But over the next weeks we started to make headway.

  “Except, and this is the dumb fucking thing, the fact that I’d lied was picking at me. Not because I’m an angel. I’ve lied before and survived. It was more that the sole thing I had to feel good about in the situation was inhabiting the moral high ground. She was the bad guy here, and I was the good. But the tiny little lie I’d told undermined that, and so it pecked at me. If we were going to get to the other side of this thing, I thought, then everything needed to be out in the open. I was asking her, all the time, to be honest. But I wasn’t being honest. And so I told her. And that’s what fucked us up.”

  “But that’s not fair,” Feather said.

  I blinked. Hesitated. Realized I should keep talking.

  “Actually, it is,” I said. “Because she’d asked me, several times. She’d asked what specific things had made me start to suspect. And I’d had to make some up, back-fitting things I’d only put together since it came out in the open. That first lie trapped me into others. There had been a lot of brutal honestly flying around. I’d asked for it. Demanded it. She’d provided, even when it made her look bad and feel terrible. And meanwhile I’d been lying to her face. It wasn’t even the fact that her best friend fed me the tip, though that was not ideal because suddenly that woman’s motivations were called into question and eventually there was a very loud phone conversation between Kristy and her. They’ve never spoken since.

  “But that wasn’t the real thing, the bad thing. The bad thing was the lies. A small lie is just as much a lie as a big one. And like one of those smart dead guys said—it’s not the content of the particular lie you told me that’s the problem; it’s that I can’t believe you anymore. That’s what destroys everything. Suddenly, instead of being one of the closest couples I’d ever known, we were people who’d been prepared to lie to each other, time after time. We’d built separate worlds out of things that weren’t true, and were living in them alone—rather than inhabiting the real world together. That breaks a spell. Over the next few months we spiraled slowly in opposite directions. I tried to pull us back. She did, too. We really tried. But we were through.”

  “It’s still not fair.”

  “It is what it is, and what’s done is done. But my point is I get how corrosive lies become. I understand the need to be able to live with yourself, to not have something lurking back in the dark of your mind, stopping you from being at peace. Are you going to be able to live with that?”

  “Nice try,” she said. “Yes, Nolan, I will. It is what it is, as you would say. It’s been nice talking, but I really am going to go now. I’ve got things to do.”

  “What things?”

  “They don’t concern you. So—did it help, sharing all that with me?”

  “Not really.”

  “That’s a shame. But I wouldn’t want Ken to think you’ve lost your touch, so here’s a little information in return. The paintings you saw are fifty thousand years old—so, yes, a long time before humans are conventionally agreed to have gotten to this continent—and they’re part of the jigsaw I know you’re smart enough to put together. Kincaid did. Well, Jordan was the brains on that part. He wrote a paper when he got back to Washington, and submitted to the Smithsonian right away. They buried it. Immediately, and very deep. We have that paper. We always knew what they’d found. It was only a matter of waiting until the time was right. And all we needed was the one thing they kept secret, the thing you were smart enough to work out—where this place actually was.

  “And you’ve also got the building blocks to figure out what they figured out, but they’re not all in those rooms, and they’re not all in your head, either. There’s a big story here, Nolan—a huge story. An arc. Don’t let me down. I believe in you. You’re going to want to know, and you deserve to.”

  “Just tell—”

  “That’s it, babe. I’m done.”

  I didn’t get up for a while. She’d gone, for real this time. I could tell, somehow.

  I didn’t try to get anywhere with what she’d said. I wasn’t sure it meant anything and I was worn out, my head fuzzy and broken. I didn’t feel bad for having told her what I’d told her. It’s old news.

  And I hadn’t told the whole truth, either.

  Of course I had sex with Kristy’s friend that night. I really am that fucking dumb. It was a drunken mistake and I admitted it. It was what killed us in the end. You could argue that event B wouldn’t have happened without event A, which is true, but all that would prove is you’ve never been in a long-term relationship. Logic is never the issue and there is no court of appeal. And as Molly had said, it’s not like it’s big stuff. None of it’s big stuff. Unless you were there.

  Unless it’s your stuff.

  I think I fell asleep for a few minutes, or at least nodded into a half doze.

  Then I heard something coming toward me in the darkness.

  It wasn’t coming fast, but it wasn’t slow. It was approaching at its own pace. A soft padding sound, with little clicks that sounded like claws on rock.

  I didn’t move.

  There wasn’t anywhere I could go.

  The sound got closer, and closer. Then it stopped.

  The thing, whatever it was, felt as though it was only a yard or so from me now. There was a faint, visceral odor, like wet fur. A noise, like a sniff, then another.

  A quiet, moist sound, like jaws opening.

  I did my best to make my peace with God, the world, and everything and everybody within it.

  Then I heard it trotting away.

  Chapter

  38

  They arrived back in the main room soon after I did, the dim glow from their lights approaching out of the two tunnels. In the darkness it was like watching some creature’s face, in which one eye was getting bigger than the other. Then for a moment I was convinced it was instead a pair of cars on a highway in the fog. My desiccated brain was playing, exhaustedly coming up with interpretations of the scant information presented to it. Ken and Molly eventually emerged from their passage well ahead of the other two.

  Ken shook his head.

  “More of the same?”

  “Empty rooms,” he said, “but with those pyramid things we saw on the other side of the ball. I put my hand on one and it felt warm, which is weird. Or I’m starting to lose it. But the passage ends in a flat wall. And yeah, I watched the roof on the way back. No shafts. So—you got any news?”

  “You were right,” I said. “She was there.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing helpful. She implied again that there’s pieces we could put together. Said the paintings were fifty thousand years old.”

  “And?”

  “That’s it.”

  Ken looked at me.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m also convinced Gemma actually did feel something brush against her leg earlier. The same thing just came and had a good look at me i
n the dark.”

  Molly was very unhappy to hear this. “What was it?”

  “I don’t know. It was, like I say, dark. But I’m pretty sure if it had decided to attack, it would have won.”

  I watched Ken think this over. Dimly lit from below, he looked like he’d lost weight in his face. Okay, only an ounce or two, from dehydration, but I still didn’t like seeing it. Most of the time our culture tells you skinnier is better. It doesn’t take long in adverse conditions for that to change. The brain flips back to the old, tougher days, a mind-set in which seeing a member of your tribe reduced stirs a fear that the same will soon happen to you. That things are running out. That they may soon be gone.

  “That is,” he said, thoughtfully, “actually the best news we’ve had in a while.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Molly frowned. “How do you figure that?”

  “Because it didn’t try to eat him,” Ken said. “Which means either it’s got good taste or it’s not desperately hungry. It got in here somehow. And either recently, or via a route it’s confident it can escape through.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Let’s wait and see if the others found anything,” Ken said. “If not, then…”

  “Yeah, we’ll try that. I can’t think of anything else.”

  “Can I join the hive mind, please?” Molly said. “Or is it invite-only?”

  “The room with the paintings,” Ken said. “We didn’t get to the end. The light ran out and so we turned around.”

  “Oh, screw that,” she said. “I’m not—”

  “You’re not invited, Moll,” I said, deadpan. “You were a pain in the ass before.”

  “Ha ha.” She stuck her tongue out.

  We turned at the sound of Pierre and Gemma emerging from the other passage, then hurried over when we realized Pierre had his arm around Gemma’s waist, half carrying her.