The Anomaly Page 4

  “Nicely dodged, again. Carefully not saying anything. Again. I’d love to ask whether you wanted coffee or tea. My guess is you’d wind up with both. Or neither.”

  “Look, screw this,” I said. By now my voice had gotten loud, and I saw Ken glance over in our direction. “You said you wanted to do a genuine piece of journalism about the show. This kind of bullshit isn’t how you deal with a fellow professional.”

  “But you’re not a professional,” she said calmly. “Except in the limited sense that you eke a living out of it. No, I’m not an epistemo-whatever-the-fuck. And you have zero qualifications in archeology or anything else. You’re a cut-and-paste merchant who qualifies every assertion with ‘Could it possibly be that…’ or ‘This has led some to wonder if…,’ so in the end you never actually say anything.”

  “I’m just—”

  “And I don’t think you even believe any of it. That’s the worst part. You don’t really think there’s an alien spaceship in Area 51. You don’t think we’re ever going to find Noah’s Ark. You just know a good fairy tale when you see one, and you’ve developed the knack of selling secondhand snake oil to the drooling imbeciles of the interwebs.”

  “And how does that make me different from you? Your stuff’s hardly Pulitzer bait, is it? ‘Ten Reasons Why Nobody Hires Jessica Biel Anymore.’ Classy, important think pieces.”

  This evidently hit a nerve. “I’m writing material of greater substance these days.”

  “A couple of unpaid op-eds in the Huffington Post make you neither Woodward nor Bernstein.”

  “Noted,” she snapped. “And now we’re speaking of real journalists, does it bug you that Kristy’s doing so well?”

  “Kristy who?”

  She hesitated. Then rolled her eyes. “Ha ha. You know which Kristy. Your ex-wife Kristy.”

  “Define ‘well.’”

  “Seriously? Everything she types immediately syndicated across the world before she lifts her dainty hands from the keyboard. One of the most-viewed TED Talks of all time. Just listed in the Top Fifty Female Opinion Formers in the USA—okay, only at number forty-three, but still. Over a quarter million Twitter followers. Off at the moment doing something super-worthy about permafrost in Alaska. So petite and skinny-fit that she vanishes from sight when she turns to the side. That kind of doing well.”

  “Certainly sounds like it bugs you. So much for the sisterhood, huh.”

  “You’re really kind of an asshole, aren’t you.”

  “It’s been said.”

  “Seriously. Does it bother you?”

  “Being an asshole? No. I’m used to it.”

  She just looked at me and waited. “Not at all,” I said. “Kristy deserves every success. She has real and valuable opinions. She has integrity. She’s the smartest person I’ve ever met.”

  “So how come you split, if she’s such a peach?”

  “Because none of those things are true of me.” Everybody was standing now at the SUV with backpacks on, ready to roll and clearly waiting for us. “It’s time to go.”

  She smiled at me, head cocked. “I’m surprised. I thought you’d be harder to knock over than this.”

  “No, I fall down easy,” I said, suddenly feeling very tired. “My trick is I generally get back up.”

  From the files of Nolan Moore:

  GRAND CANYON, THOMAS MORAN, 1916

  Chapter

  6

  Twenty minutes later we’d started the descent. After the steep initial section—during which I’m not ashamed to admit I kept one hand on the wall most of the time—the path gradually snaked back and forth as we headed slowly downward, the team soon a straggling line along the trail. We all wore backpacks and were carrying additional weight in the form of equipment, notably a shit-ton of camera batteries, and so everybody was pretty focused on their feet, looking up only occasionally to gawk at the extravagant beauty of the canyon.

  I was some way behind the rest of the group, walking by myself. I wasn’t being a prima donna. I just didn’t want company. I wasn’t fuming or nursing bad thoughts about Gemma, either. I knew perfectly well that she was right. In some ways, to some eyes. Including my own.

  Though I’ve been interested in weird history and the unexplained since I was a kid, I’m not an archeologist. Until three years ago I was in the movie industry. Or near it. I was a screenwriter, which is to “being in the movies” what waiting tables is to attending the party. I worked hard and earned some money and jumped through all the right hoops. I tried. For years.

  I just wasn’t any good. Or not good enough, anyway. I finally bailed on the industry after a year writing and rewriting a surefire winner. It was TV on this occasion, the long-cherished pet project of a guy near the top of Fox, and thus Totally Guaranteed to Get Made. Then one day he suddenly wasn’t there anymore, for reasons I never established—it was like he was abducted—and his successor followed the standard procedure of setting fire to any project that had consumed conspicuous resources before she arrived.

  I took the meeting, was polite and professional and did not stab her with a pen, and walked out sanguinely considering which of my spec scripts I’d return to, phone in hand to inform my agent I was back in the ring and he should put me up for every open assignment in town. Then I stopped walking.

  People tutted as I stood on the sidewalk and stared down at my trusty phone. It looked like an alien artifact, and I realized that the promising ideas on my laptop were destined to remain that way. Empty promises.

  I shoved the phone back in my pocket and walked Pico Boulevard all the way to Santa Monica. This, in case you’re unfamiliar with the geography of LA, is a very long way.

  By the time I got to the ocean I was hot and tired, perplexed and a little concerned to find my face wet with tears I hadn’t noticed shedding. I was exhausted, frustrated, and bored to death. I lay on the beach, trying to doggedly rekindle the phoenix of my mojo as I had so many times before, acknowledging that I should take a break—the Fox guy had been a smart producer but excessively focused, and I’d been working long, long days for a long, long time—but basically telling myself to get on with life as I knew it.

  Neither of these things happened.

  My soul was empty.

  I was done.

  When the light started to fade I called Kristy and she came and picked me up. We went out in our neighborhood and sat in a bar with our arms around each other and she told me how talented I was and how I’d find my thing eventually and everything would be great and that she loved me.

  We were like that, then.

  I became aware of footsteps approaching, and looked up to see Ken falling back to join me. The trail had temporarily widened enough for two people to walk abreast.

  “So,” he said. “I’m pleased to report that morale up front is high. Pierre is getting good stuff, and that Feather girl turns out to be a cheerful little love who’s causing me no grief whatsoever. It’s all fabulous, basically, apart, I’m sensing, from within what passes for the soul of Nolan Moore.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Bollocks you are. I overheard the closing stages of that little ‘interview’ up there. Voices got loud.”

  “If you say that you told me so, I will slay you.”

  “No need. And fuck it. I don’t say this often, because I don’t want to encourage you. But you’re good at what you do, Nolan. That’s nothing to do with talent, because you have none. But you find stuff worth saying and then you say it, nice and clearly. Whether you believe any of it doesn’t matter.”

  “I think it does.”

  “That’s because you’re a tosser. Bit of history for you, mate. As you know, the most successful movie I ever made was called The Undying Dead.”

  “I…still haven’t seen it.”

  “Good. It’s still a piece of crap. But it got great word of mouth and we were in profit before it even went to DVD. The Kenmobile came out of that movie. And the wife’s tits. Her choice—I was perfectly
happy with the ones she had. Anyway. The movie was by-the-numbers vampire bollocks, and the director was the biggest wanker I ever had the misfortune of working with. Nick, his name was, Nick Golson. What a cunt. But I ran into him six months ago during a party at a horror convention down in San Diego—he’s churning out zombie shit for cable these days—and I joked with him about how fucking poor The Undying Dead was. He listened, and when I was done, he crooked his finger. I followed him across the party to this woman. He tells her I was the producer on Dead, and asked her to tell me what she’d just told him. I won’t bore you with the details but basically her mum died a month before the movie came out, and there was a chunk of dialogue—which I wrote, information that Golson was man enough to volunteer, amazingly—that helped her move on, come to terms, all that. Nearly twenty years later, she’s still grateful. Quoted the entire speech, word for word.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “It is. And so I did not tell her that I’d written most of it while taking a shit. My point is neither you nor I know what will matter to the audience in the long run. The truth? Who gives a fuck? The Bible’s full of utter cock and there are ten thousand wankers out there using it as an excuse to behave like total fucking arseholes. Same as the Koran and the Talmud and probably whatever the fuck it is that Buddhists get their spells out of. But on the other hand there’s been millions of people, over thousands of years, who’ve got through the day because of that bullshit, or had their heart lifted, or looked at the world differently for ten minutes.”

  “The Anomaly Files is not a spiritual enterprise, Ken.”

  “Isn’t it? You say one thing in each episode that makes someone see the universe as a bit less tedious, or makes them ask questions about the world, it’s job done, mate. Whether it’s ‘true’ or not, or what that snide Millennial bitch Gemma thinks…who cares? The truth is for teenagers and hippies. We’re too old and ugly for that crap. ‘Wake me up, make me think, or buy me a drink. Otherwise, fuck off.’”

  “You have unexpected depths, brother.”

  “No, I’m a twat. So are you. Now get your head straight and let’s go find this fucking cavern.”

  “We’re not going to find it, Ken, you know that.”

  “It matters not, mate. Isn’t that what you always say?”

  He picked up the pace, and I followed him and the others down into the canyon.

  Chapter

  7

  That’s the boat?”

  It was well after midday now and very hot. You could have lit a match off the inside of my mouth. The trail had remained manageable, though increasingly narrow and broken-up, slowly winding down through a series of gullies for much of the time, at others a more precarious progress along sheer wall.

  The first hour or so had felt glorious and intrepid. The air was still cool and the experience of slowly descending into the canyon—stretched out like a painting of Mars on the jacket of a 1960s science fiction novel—was genuinely magical.

  It is, however, characteristic of the human mind that custom will stale life’s infinite variety. The next several hours had gone on a bit, if I’m honest. I’ve always been of the opinion that if a hike takes longer than, say, forty minutes, there’s an argument you should have parked closer to your destination.

  The final section perked up again as we wound closer and closer to the river. Now, only a hundred yards away, we’d turned a corner around a huge outcrop—and there, on a beachy area below, lay a large pastel-blue craft. The front quarter consisted of low rigid structures in white plastic. The rest was inflatable. A much smaller dinghy was lashed to the back.

  “Well, yes,” Molly said.

  Ken peered down. “It’s got no fucking engine, Moll.”

  “No. It’s a rowing raft. For rowing.”

  “Are you having a laugh?”

  “No,” she said patiently. “I explained this the other night. We were supposed to have a boat with an engine. That’s what I booked. But now we’ve got this instead, which is twice as big, and means as well as sleeping bags, it comes with several small tents. Which is a bonus.”

  “But it has no engine. Is my point.”

  “You win some, you lose some.”

  “So we have to row it?”

  “It’ll do you good.”

  “Fuck’s sake.”

  Twenty minutes later we stepped off the end of the trail down onto the rocky bank of the river.

  “Wow,” Feather said, turning in a slow circle, looking up. “Unbelievable. Awesome. Wonderful.”

  The walls of the canyon had been towering over us for most of the morning but reaching the bottom multiplied the effect a hundredfold. Nearly a mile of rock face above, and down here, a river only a hundred feet wide. You felt as if you were somewhere secret, strange, and old—an environment that predated human expectations, and a place where unusual things might be true.

  A man came striding toward us from where he’d been waiting in shade. He was immediately identifiable as one of those gung-ho guys who’s so brim-full of testosterone that he’s going bald at thirty. He introduced himself as Dylan, and appeared to be South African, for some reason.

  After shaking hands with everyone he turned to me. “So you’re the Indiana Jones figure, hey?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Awesome. One thing, though. On the river, I’m boss. We’ll get most of the way this afternoon, camp tonight, and should make it to your target area after a few hours tomorrow. It’s plain sailing apart from a stretch of rapids later today, which are bouncier than usual because a tremor pulled some rocks down last year. But even when it’s calm we don’t mess around when we’re this far from civilization, okay? Do you have a lot of experience in boats like this?”

  “Not much,” I said, aware of Gemma’s eyes on me.

  He cocked his head. “So how much experience would that be, exactly? Just to be clear.”

  “Exactly? None.”

  “Best do what I tell you, then, and we’ll all have a ball. Okay?”

  “Sure,” I said. I didn’t bother to explain that if he felt the need to establish dominance he should have been addressing Ken, or Molly. He’d find that out soon enough. I could, however, have done without seeing Gemma pull out her notepad. I was confident that, whatever else her piece might eventually contain, this exchange would make the final draft. Probably as a pull quote.

  Dylan spent the next half hour demonstrating how to stow our stuff in the waterproof lockers, wear life jackets, and use rowing gloves to prevent blisters; explaining the relevance of oars in relation to the waterborne propulsion process; and generally patronizing us as thoroughly as possible. Pretty soon he antagonized Pierre sufficiently that Pierre started dropping in references to annoyingly intrepid experiences he’d personally undertaken in watergoing craft. I wandered off to have a cigarette while they waved their penises at each other.

  Ken joined me, glaring at his phone. “Barely a single bar of signal,” he muttered. “It’s the fucking Dark Ages down here.”

  “Excellent,” I said. “Because who knows what secrets our forebears cherished, the deep spiritual insights they shared, when not enslaved by technology’s endless grip upon our—”

  “Shut it, you tool.”

  Eventually we got in the damned boat, which was big enough that the process didn’t feel especially perilous or result in someone falling amusingly into the water. Once we’d worked out where and how we were going to sit, Pierre and Ken and I clambered back out again. Naturally when we started heading downriver we’d be doing most of the shooting so it looked like I was on a solitary quest, but audiences are savvy enough these days to realize the guy who yaks to the camera can’t also be pointing the thing, and Ken felt there was an argument for letting it be seen that a team of people were involved—on the grounds it made the expedition seem more of a big deal, not just me screwing around in a canoe for my own amusement.

  So the others got to work fastening ropes that had already been fast
ened once, and taking off their life jackets and then putting them back on again, while Pierre lined up a shot that situated this activity tastefully to one side of frame while focusing on a wide angle across the river, me standing on the beach in the foreground. Ken lofted the boom mike and nodded at me to start talking.

  “We’re not the first to go looking for Kincaid’s cavern,” I said in my most thoughtful voice. “Something that strange, that game-changing…there have been other attempts. All unsuccessful. Kincaid’s account is quite specific in some regards, frustratingly vague in others. And perhaps not accidentally so. One of the first things he’s quoted as saying is—and these are his exact words—‘I would impress that the cavern is nearly inaccessible.’ He goes on to state that ‘the entrance is 1,486 feet down the sheer canyon wall.’”

  I half turned to indicate the canyon wall on the other side of the river, and Pierre neatly shifted angle to reinforce this, slowly tilting back to show the mile-plus of rock face dwarfing us. “Then he says it’s on government land. And then adds that anybody found there will be prosecuted for trespass. Bear in mind this article was published back when just getting to the canyon was a feat of endurance. There were no roads or trains or air-conditioned cars. To then track down a hidden cavern halfway up a vertical rock face, along mile after mile of canyon? Forget it. That’s what Kincaid’s saying, and that—to me—is extremely interesting. Because to me it suggests that these explorers knew what they’d come upon was of extraordinary importance. And that suggests to me that this thing is real. And out there to be found.”

  I left a beat of silence, so it’d be easy to cut at that point, then gestured to Dylan. “I’d like to introduce you to Dylan,” I said. “He’s experienced on these waters, and he’s going to be our guide for this part of the expedition.”

  Dylan strode over, squaring his shoulders to look even more butch. “Hey.”