The Anomaly

by Michael Rutger

  Meanwhile, Feather was beaming at me. “I don’t want to sound like a fangirl,” she said, “but…okay, let’s face it, I’m a total fangirl. I love your show. What you’re doing is incredibly important, Nolan. And I want to thank you for it.”

  “Well, we should be thanking you,” I said, disliking the heartiness in my voice.

  “Happy to be able to help,” she said. “So happy.”

  “I’d love to hear more about what the Palinhem Foundation actually does,” I said, trying to imply that I was on top of all but the finest details. In fact I had no clue. Our new sponsors had come directly to Ken and he’d handled the negotiations. Or more likely said yes without a second thought. He’d take cash from the NRA if they promised to keep out of his face during filming. And gave him a gun. Without the Foundation’s cash injection—and their controlling stake in the NewerWorld cable network—there’s no way we’d have this chance of the jump to a real TV show. Being conspicuously nice to Feather was high on my list of priorities over the coming days—as Ken had reminded me, many times.

  “Truth,” she breathed. “That’s what we’re about.”

  “Absolutely. But, uh, in what way?”

  “The way you mean it, Nolan. What you’ve shown us time after time in The Anomaly Files. We need a compelling voice to fight the way scientists, the government, and the liberal autocracy have painted a misleading picture of the world and a false narrative of human history, stomping down on anything that doesn’t fit their agenda.”

  I wasn’t sure what the “liberal autocracy” was supposed to be—and actually it sounded like something I should probably not be against—but smiled warmly anyway. “Right on.”

  “Yeah, but seriously,” Ken said. “Where’s the money come from? Don’t think I’m not grateful, love. I’m just curious.”

  “Seth Palinhem was a successful industrialist,” Feather said. She used the term as you might say “violent alcoholic.” “He died ten years back. Thankfully, toward the end of his life he realized there were bigger truths and wider horizons. He set up his foundation to fund researchers who shared his vision. This is my first big project. I’m so excited to be here.”

  “And it’s a pleasure to have you,” Ken said, dutifully taking his turn to sound hearty, though I’d been there to witness his reaction when he discovered that a Palinhem representative wanted to do a ride-along on the first shoot of the new season. It had featured foul language of a breadth, inventiveness, and duration that may never be bettered in the course of human history. I wish I had it on tape.

  “I only hope you’re not going to be bored,” I said. “Making TV involves a lot of waiting around.”

  “I won’t be for a second, I’m sure. And I want to be helpful,” she said. “Part of the team. So what can I do? When the expedition starts?”

  “Don’t worry, love,” Ken said breezily. “We’ll think of something. Just ask Molly.”

  My suspicion was that “something” was going to be a master class in fetching and carrying objects of zero import, occasionally being asked for an opinion on things that didn’t matter, and generally being kept out of the way.

  At that moment Molly returned and plonked herself down on the couch, looking satiated. Ken grinned at her. “So—do we have the boat we ordered?”

  “No,” she said tersely. “We have a bigger and better boat. For the same price.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  “Different guide from the one I talked to before, but this guy’s more experienced, apparently. So that’s a win, too.”

  “Nice. Though who needs a guide when we’ve got Nolan to lead the way?”

  They winked at each other in a way that was doubtless intended to be amusing.

  When Pierre arrived with the drinks, I was surprised—and annoyed—to see Laptop Lady from the bar behind him. I’d seen him work fast, but this had to be a record.

  “Okay,” he said, however. “So, this is Gemma, who’s coming with us apparently?”

  “Good,” Molly said. “But where’s my drink?”

  Pierre rolled his eyes and headed back toward the bar. Laptop Lady held her ground and smiled down at us, apparently unfazed at being abandoned with strangers.

  Then it dawned on me. “Gemma,” I said, standing and reaching out to shake her hand. “Great to meet you.”

  “Likewise, Nolan,” she said. Her hand was cool.

  She was offered a space on the couch between Ken and Molly, but took a nearby stool instead. “How come you didn’t say hi when I was at the bar?” I asked.

  “Heisenberg.”

  Ken frowned. “The bloke from Breaking Bad?”

  Gemma laughed. “No. My being here can’t help but affect the dynamic of your little team. I wanted some time to watch you before joining the group. Get a sense of you all.”

  Ken and I glanced at each other. His face remained expressionless, but his left eyebrow rose a millimeter: Ken-speak for Careful with this one.

  There was chatting, more drinks, the eating of burgers and club sandwiches and fries.

  “All right, you bastards,” Ken said when it got to ten o’clock. He stood decisively, a bucket of hard liquor having its customary lack of effect other than making his voice twenty percent louder and causing his body to appear, curiously, ten percent wider. “Tomorrow, the adventure begins. So fuck off to bed now, all of you. Wake-ups are booked for five a.m. Be standing by the car by six or you’ll be walking.”

  Everybody started to leave. “If you’re available,” Gemma said to me, “it’d be great to start getting some—”

  “Not tonight,” Ken told her firmly. “Nolan’s got more important things to do.”

  “Plenty of time over the next two days,” I said, trying to be charming. She smiled in a way that made it impossible to tell whether I had succeeded, and walked away.

  Ken sniggered—he loves playing bad cop—and we headed out for a cigarette. “Still think that’s a stupid idea,” he said as we emerged into the parking lot.

  “And I still think you’re wrong. An article about the show, on a site with a bazillion readers—what’s the downside?”

  “Not all publicity is good, Nolan.”

  “I’ve got final approval.”

  “Of course you haven’t. All Gemma has to do is press a key on her laptop and a hatchet job will be up on the site in two seconds. By the time we get her editor to pull it down it’s already been read and retweeted.”

  “By the five people who give a shit.”

  “It’s more like ten these days,” he said. “You’re moving up in the world, Nolan. And I couldn’t care less about the fans. For our loyal conspiracy nuts, The Anomaly Files being ridiculed by a proper news site is just further proof we’re onto something. It’s a no-lose. And hardly the first time. Remember that MediaBlitz piece on you last year?”

  “Not after all the therapy I had afterward, no.”

  “Exactly. And we survived. But what I do care about is not fucking up the deal with Palinhem.”

  “It’ll be fine,” I said.

  “It needs to be a lot better than fine, you muppet.” He was looking at me seriously now. “For reasons I don’t understand but am trying not to question, the universe has thrown us a major bone here. We’ve got this one shot at cable. Blowing it is not an option. I’ll be honest, Nolan. We get bounced back to webcasts, I’m done.”

  I tried to shrug this off, but he saw the look on my face.

  “Sorry, mate. It’s been fun, but it’s barely keeping me in vodka and porn. I’d insist on me or Molly riding shotgun whenever you talk to that Gemma woman, but you’d ignore it. So repeat after me: ‘I will not fuck everything up.’”

  “Ken—”

  “Repeat it, you tit.”

  I mumbled. “Won’t fuck it up. Dad.”

  He sighed. “Go do your thing—and make it good. Then get some sleep. Lots of on-camera time for you tomorrow on the hike down. It’d be good if you didn’t look deceased.”

&n
bsp; As I headed for the stairs to go up to my room, I passed Gemma and Feather waiting at the elevator.

  “For the record,” Feather was saying, “Heisenberg proposed the uncertainty principle. I think you meant the observer effect. Hope that helps.”

  Gemma blinked. Feather smiled sweetly.

  I decided that I could come to like Feather.

  From the files of Nolan Moore:

  THE PHOENIX GAZETTE—APRIL 5, 1909

  Chapter

  3

  Up in the room I drank several glasses of water, tried unsuccessfully to wrestle the air conditioner up from its subarctic setting, and sat at the desk. I had most of the blog post drafted already but I like to finesse them at the last minute. People would see the piece, no question—the newsletter has over thirty thousand subscribers, and the show has slowly clawed its way up to 93,211 Twitter followers (not that I obsessively check). Hardly stellar, but these were numbers I hoped would increase exponentially once we started going out on cable. You can bullshit all you like about how YouTube is the medium of choice for the young and smartphoned, but even a professionally produced webcast gets no respect compared to an actual network.

  Ken was right. This was a big deal, and not to be screwed up. But did people care that the time and date at the top of the blog post were real? I told myself it gave the material a here-and-now veracity. And maybe it did. Or perhaps it was a question of kidding myself that I was a real investigative journalist. Either way, it needed to be done.

  I rolled up my sleeves and started typing my last blog post from the world as we knew it.

  DAY 1: THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM

  I’m sitting in a hotel room twenty miles from the Grand Canyon. From my window I can see the lamps of the parking lot, and beyond it, darkness shrouds mile upon mile of the great desert: a forbidding environment that deflects mankind’s gaze—and, I believe, cradles secrets waiting to be told.

  It’s been a long day getting here. And now, as always at the start of an expedition, I’m filled with both excitement and a sense of responsibility. I know how many of you share my conviction that the world is a far larger place than we’re allowed to believe—and that access to the facts will open our eyes to the wonders of our land, our species, the entire planet…with its curious corners and extraordinary secrets.

  So let’s look at some of those facts.

  On April 5, 1909, the Phoenix Gazette—at the time, one of Arizona’s leading and most respected news sources—ran a front-page story under the headline EXPLORATIONS IN GRAND CANYON. The article details how a hunter and explorer named G. E. Kincaid came to the newspaper with a story. He told how a recent expedition—conducted under the auspices of the Smithsonian, and directed by one Professor S. A. Jordan—traveled to a spot Kincaid had previously come upon while cruising down the Colorado River (and that “down” is important, as you’ll see over the next two days), prospecting for minerals in the Grand Canyon.

  There, halfway up the sheer 3,000-foot wall of the canyon, Kincaid had spotted an opening. He’d clambered up and discovered that a cave lay beyond, a passageway into the rock, nearly a half mile below the current desert level. He’d explored a little, finding a few relics. These he dispatched to Washington. His finds were enough to inspire the Smithsonian to fund the expedition led by Professor Jordan.

  There are other crevices in the Grand Canyon. Stanton’s Cave, for example, is home not only to some striking big-eared bats but also to four-thousand-year-old twig figurines, shells, and beads, and ten-thousand-year-old remains of giant condors and mountain goats. Though inside this cave, the Kincaid Cavern, they didn’t find mere twigs and bones.

  They found…wonders.

  But…it’s getting late, and we’ve got an early start tomorrow. So for now I’ll just urge you to read the original article (linked here), and read for yourself what they discovered. What they claimed to discover, at any rate—claims that have been ignored or derided by the archeological establishment ever since.

  Try to decide whether this article is a piece of idle make-believe, or if it’s possible these brave and inquiring men of yesteryear uncovered evidence that North America was visited in eldritch times by another culture. Consider the question of whether the idols, artifacts, and crypt that Kincaid and his colleagues claimed to have explored in 1909—which, admittedly, no one has ever been able to locate in the century since—are mere figments of imagination…or if there is a great truth here.

  A truth we’re not being told.

  I’ll admit it’s curious that the Smithsonian claims to have no record of Kincaid. No record, either, of this Professor Jordan. But as we’ve seen in previous episodes of The Anomaly Files, the Smithsonian has a long record of being tight-lipped—perhaps even of being prone to “counterfactual statements”—when it comes to any idea that contradicts the consensus the museum was established to maintain.

  Questions. Doubts. A fog between us and the truth. I don’t want to live my life in a fog—and from what you tell me in the comments section, and via Twitter and our Instagram page (links at the bottom), you feel the same. And so tomorrow we’re going to once more cut through all this smoke and try to find evidence of the fire beneath.

  We’re going looking for Kincaid’s cavern.

  It won’t be easy. We will be breaking the law, entering the canyon via a route that’s closed to the public (and why, you might well ask, should that be?). I have spent many hours conducting my own analysis of the original account, and as a result I’ll be leading us toward a location that’s quite different from where others have tried before.

  Will we find the cavern? I don’t know. But I do know this: In the search for truth, it matters not whether we find.

  It matters only that we continue to seek.

  I’d better turn in. Tomorrow the expedition starts in earnest. We’ll start by hiking down to

  I stopped typing and rubbed my eyes.

  The fog/smoke mixed metaphor wasn’t great. It needed a stirring final paragraph, and stardust sprinkled over it. It was hokey and below my usual standard. When you’re selling a sense of wonder, you need to feel it.

  I wasn’t feeling it.

  For that I needed coffee and a cigarette. The latter meant schlepping downstairs, which I decided would be a more appealing prospect if I made the coffee first and could take it with me. Let it not be said that I am incapable of long-term planning.

  While I waited for the coffee to brew I corrected a few typos and then flipped over to Twitter and spent a couple of minutes replying to comments. There weren’t many, because I’d done this before heading down to the bar earlier. There hadn’t been many then, either.

  But that was going to change. Right?

  The coffeemaker started to cough like a consumptive dog, indicating it still had a minute left to go. This unfortunately gave me a little spare time. In it I did something I’d been determined not to.

  I typed in a Twitter username.

  The relevant homepage loaded quickly. I flicked down, feeling like an intruder, glimpsing tweets in her distinctive, direct style. I told myself that I had a very different audience but the fact was that Kristy was simply better at concentrating her messages down to tweetable length. Better at writing in general, if the truth be told.

  The header image was different from last time I’d yielded to this impulse, a few weeks before. It showed her standing somewhere wild and cold, looking dynamic and committed—yet also down-to-earth and vulnerable.

  There was a link to a recent blog post on her main site, from two days back. I couldn’t face reading it, but cached the post to my phone for later, or more likely never.

  I flicked back to her Twitter homepage and looked at the most recent pictures in the timeline. They were also of somewhere cold. The accompanying tweets doubtless explained where she was, and why, but I didn’t read them.

  I didn’t need to know.

  I took my coffee downstairs and stood in an especially uninteresting section of th
e parking lot. As a smoker you often get to see the backs of places, parts other people don’t notice, the secrets hidden in plain sight. I once tried convincing Ken this was kind of a metaphor for The Anomaly Files, but he just stared at me for a while and then walked away.

  It was very cold now, and it occurred to me that a smarter guy would have brought along a thicker sweater for the night we’d be spending in the canyon. Too late. I wish I were that guy. It must be great being him.

  Halfway through the smoke I realized I could hear voices, low tones in what was otherwise silence. Sounded like a man and a woman, around the corner. She was doing most of the talking. I couldn’t make out the words but the cadences sounded familiar.

  It struck me that it might be the receptionist I’d encountered when we checked in. I regarded that as an unsuccessful human interaction, and I’d had enough to drink over the course of the evening that it seemed like a good idea to stroll around the corner and be affable at her.

  As I walked in their direction, however, the voices suddenly stopped, as if they’d heard me coming. There was silence for a moment, then two sets of footsteps, rapidly receding.

  By the time I’d turned the corner there was no one there. No telltale smell of smoke, either, or butts on the ground. Some minor hotel-based intrigue, most likely, and none of my business. It still left me feeling vaguely rejected and alone.

  I went back upstairs, fixed my post, and submitted it. Then I went to bed and listened to the air conditioner until I eventually fell asleep.

  Chapter

  4

  Very early the next morning Ken strolled pugnaciously out of the hotel lobby, steaming cardboard cup in hand.

  “Fuck are you looking so smug about?” he said.

  I’d been there ten minutes, long enough to discover that a desert lot at 5:45 a.m. is no warmer than it is at midnight. “It’s not smugness,” I said. “I can’t move my face.”