The Anomaly Read online

  The screen of the phone flickered to life. I held it up above my head—revealing eight badly lit feet of tunnel.

  Ken and I spread out across the passage. We drew level with the stinking room but kept going, on the unspoken assumption that nothing would go in there if it had a choice.

  Ken kept his gaze on the passage ahead while I peered into the doorways as they coalesced out of the darkness. All were empty, further examples of the anonymous rectangular spaces we’d seen down passages on the other side of the main area, with the small rock pyramids.

  “Hell did it go?”

  “We’re not finished yet. And however it got in here…”

  “I know.”

  We kept pushing forward, and a couple of minutes later came across a doorway that was narrower than the others, opposite one final room.

  “Doesn’t that look a lot like…”

  “Yes,” Ken said. We quickly headed into the narrow passageway. Off the passage on the other side of the main room was a line of the hieroglyphs chiseled into the wall.

  After fifty yards the floor stopped abruptly. A foot below was crystal-clear water.

  “Oh, thank Christ for that. It’s another pool.”

  “Back away, Nolan. We do not want to kick a single grain of dust into it. And given what just happened to Gemma, I’m not sure I’d risk it anyway.”

  We turned and hurried back up the tunnel into the passage. “Okay, so it’s got to be in the room opposite.”

  “How do we do this?”

  “Block the doorway together so it can’t get out.”

  “And then what?”

  “Ask it politely how the fuck it got in here.”

  “Ken…”

  “If it feels cornered, it’s going to run back out the way it came.”

  “Or it could just attack us, Ken.”

  “Yeah. There’s that.”

  We were halfway across the passage when Molly started shouting Ken’s name from the main room.

  Shouting it like a siren.

  “Shit,” Ken said. “It got around us.”

  But when we reached the room, Molly and Pierre were in the center, near Gemma’s body. Molly turned. Her eyes were wild.

  “Where were you?”

  “Just…looking,” Ken said. “What’s up?”

  She pointed down at Gemma’s body. “We heard something. Like a…I don’t know. Look at her.”

  At first Gemma just looked like she had when I’d last seen her. Deader, but otherwise the same. Then I saw what Molly meant. Her abdomen was even more swollen.

  “It’s gas, trapped inside…her,” I said. The shape on the ground really didn’t seem like a “her” anymore. “I guess…I guess even though she’s dead, it’s still increasing. It does that postmortem. As the…processes of decay start to take place.”

  “That quickly? And shouldn’t it be able to escape?”

  “I don’t think so. The autonomic nervous system…”

  I stopped. For a second there, in the low light, it looked as though the surface of her belly moved. The buildup was continuing, very fast. “I don’t know much about what happens to bodies after death. But I think it’s going to keep…”

  Then it happened again. A bulge, more on one side of her stomach than the other, strong enough to strain the buttons on her blood-soaked blouse.

  Ken was ahead of me. He always is. “Nolan—get away from her.”

  I didn’t understand. He grabbed me by the arm and yanked hard. “Get away from her.”

  I scrabbled back, finally realized what he meant. The gas was building up so very fast that there was only one thing that could happen to the body containing it.

  There was a tearing sound as the buttons on her shirt gave way. Then a darkening as blood trickled out of a line across her belly—the pressure from inside so dreadful that it was causing the flesh to split. Or so I thought.

  But then something emerged from the line.

  This was so very wrong that it took a second to credit that it was really happening, that it wasn’t just a trick of the light, the eye misinterpreting the slow spread of dark blood.

  But no, something was coming out.

  It was leathery, like a bat’s wing, but bigger.

  It seemed to thrust out like an elbow. Then more of it was released. Another arm, or wing. A hunch of back.

  Finally a head. The creature wasn’t even that big. The size of a small hawk, though scrawny and sinewy, and with a skull that was bony and elongated.

  The thing finished digging its way out. It flopped off the glistening mess of Gemma’s belly and onto the ground, turning its head, assessing its environment.

  I stared at it, openmouthed, frozen. Pierre and Molly were the same. But Ken stepped over in one fluid motion and kicked it with all his might.

  It flew right across the room and crashed into the wall. He strode over there and was by it in seconds, heel raised.

  “Wait,” I said.

  I stood with him and looked down at it. It had already gotten itself back onto its clawlike feet, and was unfurling wings dripping with Gemma’s blood and tissue.

  “It’s a fucking pterodactyl,” Ken said.

  “Kill it.”

  He stamped on its head, and then again, and again, until it was dead.

  From the files of Nolan Moore:

  PETROGLYPH FROM THE THREE RIVERS AREA, NEW MEXICO

  Chapter

  41

  I’m kind of dumb sometimes and notoriously slow on the uptake, but I generally get there in the end. You may think you would have been faster but it’s different when you’re lost in the middle of it and far more aware of spilled blood and broken intestines and the danger of starvation than you are of abstract ideas. I was waiting for my back brain to nudge me—knowing, somehow, that it finally had something to bring to my attention—when Pierre spoke.

  “What the hell just happened?”

  He was looking to me for an answer rather than Ken, but I wasn’t there yet. He could tell I was thinking, and he waited patiently rather than repeating the question. I was long done with considering Pierre annoying.

  Meanwhile Molly rounded on Ken. “Where did you go?”

  “Hmm?” Ken sounded as if wheels were turning in his mind, too.

  “I asked where you’d been. You said ‘just looking.’”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what it was.”

  “Really?”

  Ken looked at me. I nodded. “All right,” he said. “Just before…before what just happened happened, Nolan and I saw something.”

  “Something?”

  “Kind of, well, a creature.”

  “In here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was it?”

  “Not sure,” I said. “I didn’t see it clearly. I doubt Ken did, either.” Ken shook his head. “But it was big. With teeth. When it realized we’d seen it, it disappeared.”

  Molly was staring at me now, horrified, her eyes wide. “Disappeared?”

  “Not, like, vanished. It backed off into the dark. We went looking for it. When we heard you shouting, we thought it must have gotten around us and come back here.”

  “So…so what the fuck?”

  “We don’t know, Moll,” Ken said.

  “But how did it get in here?”

  “I don’t think it did,” I said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “This morning,” I said slowly, as the idea laboriously translated itself into words. This morning seemed like a long time ago. It was back when Gemma was alive. Before she’d become that object lying on the ground between us. “This morning. There was a mosquito, right? I slapped at it.”

  “So?”

  “And Pierre—you saw a bug in the night. And maybe there’s a whole restricted little ecosystem in here and bugs are no big deal, but it’s kind of strange that we didn’t see any in the hours after we first arrived. And then this morning…Gemma felt something brush against her leg. But the way she descr
ibed it made it sound like it wasn’t big. Domestic cat-sized, or a small dog. Right? Then something came up to me in the dark after I’d been talking to Feather. I didn’t see it and so I can’t swear to it, but I’m sure it was larger than that. But not as big as the thing Ken and I just saw.”

  “So Gemma got it wrong,” Pierre said. “It was dark. She was already getting sick.”

  “True. Or…maybe they’re all different things.”

  “Nolan, I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

  “Come with me,” I said. “All of you. From now on, unless there’s a very good reason, we stick close together at all times. Okay?”

  Pierre and Molly mumbled assent. I grabbed the light and led them to the corridor over on the left side.

  Ken and I stood a foot back from the ledge over the pool where twenty-four hours previously the two of us—and a woman who was now very dead—had taken a swim. Molly and Pierre were behind us. I held the light up so everyone could see.

  The surface of the pool was now entirely covered with the greenish-black algae, or whatever it was. It was thicker, too, at least an inch in parts.

  The room was much hotter than it had been before. A mist overhung the water. It smelled…It didn’t smell like water. There was an organic, meaty undertone.

  Ken was nodding. “It’s got to be, hasn’t it?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  “For God’s sake,” Molly said. “What?”

  “The spheres,” I said. “The ones that were on pedestals but are now all in the water. You saw what they looked like.”

  “Yes, so?”

  “The largest was at the back. Much bigger than the others. Dark gray, a matte surface. I’m thinking that was carbon. And we saw another that looked like copper. And iron. There will have been potassium and magnesium, and calcium and others. Some of those spheres were pretty small, remember. Trace elements.”

  “What about oxygen and hydrogen?” Ken asked. “Those are the big guys, right?”

  “From water in the pool. Plus that plant stuff could now be breaking down carbon dioxide.”

  “Nitrogen?”

  “The atmosphere. And for all we know one of those balls could have contained a stock of it under pressure.”

  “Sodium, and chlorine?”

  “A ball of salt. Bromine and some others are probably bound into compounds, too.”

  “Are you guys just going to stand there listing all the chemicals there are?” Pierre asked.

  “No,” I said. “Only about twenty-eight of them.”

  “Why?” Molly said. “Why those?”

  “They’re the ones you need to create life.”

  We stood staring out over the portion of the pool visible within the lamp’s glow.

  “But how would it work?” Molly asked.

  “You got me. I know—you’d expect to see a bunch of wires and computers and stuff. And for all we know, maybe there’s a ton of that hidden under all the rock. But we don’t even know how to do what we’re suggesting is happening here. Couldn’t get it started. So whoever put this together knew stuff that we don’t. Maybe you can make rock function that way, too. Maybe this whole place is a giant computer.”

  “And it’s been sitting here all this time? But…then why did it start working?”

  “We went into the pool. Maybe that was enough—skin cells sloughing off, triggering a reaction.”

  “Or blood,” Molly said. “Remember? When you and I went down to the end in the night. There was a smear over that megalith in the middle, with all the symbols on it.”

  “Christ, yes,” I said. “Gemma. The scrape on her arm.”

  “You think that was it? Some of her blood getting in the water? Her DNA?”

  “Maybe,” Ken said. “Or maybe that rock isn’t an inscription after all. Maybe it’s a console. I mean, the way it’s right there in the middle—could be, right?”

  “And Molly—you noticed that none of the symbols repeat. And we couldn’t figure out why that would be—what message or text would have each letter or word appearing only once. That could be why. Because it’s not a text. It’s a list.”

  “A menu system,” Ken said. “Press a symbol, and that’s what it makes.”

  “Right,” I said. “Except that more than one of us ran our fingers all over it. I’m going to guess we pressed almost every single icon. The simpler, smaller things appear first because they’re faster to make. It’d already started when Molly and I were in the water last night. Which is why our skin was itching like hell first thing today. And then…”

  “This morning,” Molly said, sounding nauseous, “Gemma drank some. Which already had…that thing growing in it.”

  There was a pause while we thought about that, and about how the creature growing inside Gemma might have gained sustenance. What it must have been feeding on as it got larger and larger.

  “Nope,” Pierre said firmly. “I don’t believe any of this. None of it is even possible.”

  “Find me another explanation and I’ll be happy to listen,” I said. “Until then, this isn’t a ceremonial site. It’s a machine. And you understand that kind of thing far better than I do, so we could use your help.”

  I saw Molly staring glumly into the darkness, and added: “You too, Moll, obviously.”

  “I got nothing,” she said. “Except this. If you’re right, and this place is making all these things, it means the creature you saw didn’t have to find a way in after all. And that means there’s no way out.”

  Chapter

  42

  Pierre considered for a minute.

  “Wait here,” he said.

  “Weren’t you listening earlier? We stay together.”

  “Okay, well I want to check something.”

  We followed him back up the passage, across the main corridor, and into the room opposite. He walked straight up to the pyramid carved out of the floor and put his hand on it. “It’s warm. Really warm. I thought I felt it on another one earlier, but I wasn’t sure.”

  “Yeah,” Ken said. “I noticed that, too.”

  I went to touch the cool wall of the room, and then returned to place my hand on the pyramid. There was no question it was significantly hotter, especially at the apex.

  “You must know about pyramids, Nolan,” Pierre said. “What’s the deal with them?”

  “A bunch of people have said a bunch of stuff, for which there’s no scientific evidence. There was a fad in the seventies about the shape focusing positive energy. People made them out of wood and slept inside. Plus the Egyptians were kind of into them, as you may be aware. There’s wingnuts who’ve claimed the big pyramids in Giza were an ancient power plant.”

  “Right. And didn’t we tape you saying something a couple days ago about how some people think the Egyptians made it to the Grand Canyon?”

  “But like I said at the time, I don’t see it.”

  “It doesn’t have to be them, though,” Ken said. “It could be someone else using the same technology. Or maybe the Egyptians themselves were only ever going through the motions, obsessing about the shape because they were misremembering something that had existed long before their civilization—and it was actually some previous lot who made it here.”

  “What technology, Ken? It’s just a geometric shape.”

  “Which is very warm. Unlike all the other rock in the place. Like you said two minutes ago—find me another explanation, and I’ll run with it. Otherwise…”

  “Okay, fine. But does it help?”

  “We could try to stop them producing energy?”

  “What—all of them? Including the ones we saw in the rooms on the other side of the ball, before we got trapped here? And how? And with what? Punching them with our bare fists?”

  “All right—we got anything else?”

  “The spheres in the pool,” Pierre said thoughtfully.

  “What about them?”

  “The pyramids, whatever they’re doing, basically t
hat’s magic as far as we’re concerned. We can’t do anything about it. But if it’s those balls being in the water that mean this place can make things, then…”

  “…let’s get the balls out of the water,” Ken said.

  We stood together back at the pool. I’m not going to lie to you—getting in there felt like the least appealing prospect in the world. It wasn’t only about the slimy plants on top, or the fetid, organic smell. It was Gemma, of course. What had happened to her. Though paradoxically I knew that a large factor in why we were even trying this was to avoid thinking about her death.

  “Okay, so how do we do this?” Ken said.

  “We have to avoid getting the water in our mouths. Which should be fine because it’s not deep. But having it on the skin probably isn’t a great idea, either, if we can avoid it. It was itching like hell this morning, and it wasn’t anything like this developed when Molly and I went in last night.”

  “All right,” Ken said, stepping right up to the edge. “So how do I do that?”

  “Seriously? You’re not going in there, Ken. You are the least aquatic human I’ve ever seen.”

  “Bollocks. I go in pools all the time.”

  “I know. I’ve seen you, in Florida. You spent all afternoon in a floaty thing, consuming a series of strong alcoholic beverages. I had to help you out in the end.”

  “You’re a picky bastard, Nolan. And the way you cite past events, just because they ‘happened,’ is really annoying.”

  “I’ll do it,” Pierre said. “Nolan, give me your jeans. Ken, your sweatshirt. I’ll put them on top of my clothes.”

  “That’s not going to make a difference. It’s still going to soak through the cloth. And get on your hands.”

  “It’ll help a little. And I’ll do it fast.”

  “No, it’s going to have to be two of us,” I said. “Those balls will be heavy even if they’ve started to dissolve.”

  “This isn’t going to work,” Molly said. “How are you going to find them? There’s hundreds of square feet of floor under there, and you can’t see any of it.”