The Anomaly

by Michael Rutger

  “I’m fine,” Gemma said, turning her forearm to look at a long, deep scrape there. Blood was already beginning to bead along it. Her voice was very shaky. “Fucking fuck, though.”

  “Nicely put,” I said. “I take back everything I said about the quality of your prose.”

  I held on while she gingerly climbed back up.

  Pierre watched, hanging casually onto the wall above. “Ready?”

  We climbed.

  About ten minutes later Pierre turned and looked down at the rest of us again.

  “Nolan?”

  “What?”

  “See these little ledges, to my right?”

  “What about them?”

  “I’m going across there. Moll, Feather, and Gemma—you come this way, too. Nolan, you head straight up.”

  “Why?”

  “I can film you getting to the cavern from here.”

  “Look, Pierre—”

  “Do what he fucking says,” Ken said, tersely. “My arms are falling off. And if that thing up there is just a bloody recess, the drinks are on you forever. I mean it.”

  I waited while people climbed up the remaining ten feet and moved sideways onto the series of small ledges. They were only about eighteen inches wide and sloped markedly, and everybody but Pierre kept their hands firmly gripped to the wall. I saw Gemma rest her head against it, eyes closed, and realized she was pretty much done with this crap.

  I then waited until Pierre had carefully extricated the camera from his backpack and gotten it into position in his left hand, holding on to the wall with the right.

  “Rolling,” he said.

  I climbed the last thirty feet alone. It wasn’t hard, especially now that the end was in sight. Pierre had been correct about this, too—concavity in this section of the wall made the final chunk a lot easier than the middle portion.

  Foot by foot I went up, until the opening was just above me. I am familiar enough with the playful ways of the gods, however, that I made doubly sure every hand- and foothold was secure as I covered the remaining distance.

  Then I had a hand on the lip of the opening. I carefully pulled myself up, and a minute later, I was inside.

  From the files of Nolan Moore:

  THE CANYON

  Chapter

  14

  The opening was an irregular gash in the wall about four feet wide and five tall, with a pile of rock inside. It was immediately clear that what lay past them was more than a mere recess. Daylight illuminated about twenty feet of cave depth—with the suggestion of more beyond—and the same width. I stayed on hands and knees, turned, and stuck my head out.

  After withstanding an intense moment of vertigo at the sight of the drop, I called down, “Get up here.”

  “Is it a cavern?”

  “Yes. Yes, it is.”

  “How deep?”

  “Can’t see yet. But there’s plenty of room.”

  I moved back and waited. They arrived, one by one: Ken first, then Gemma, Molly, Feather, and finally Pierre. I stood back with Ken while the others came up, looking at the walls beyond the opening. They were rough, variable in color—rock of the type we’d been climbing. At the back was a further gap, narrower, but wide enough for two to walk abreast.

  “This it?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “What are those piles of rocks doing there?”

  “Don’t know that, either.”

  “Excellent. Glad you’re on top of everything. When Pierre’s got his breath, we need some film. And check this out.” He ran his hand along a section of the side wall. “Look kind of like chisel marks, don’t they?”

  “A little.”

  “Which Kincaid mentioned, yes?”

  “He did.”

  “Fuck me, Nolan. This could actually be the thing.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  Pierre eventually scrabbled up into the space, and had his camera in position quickly. Molly put the boom mike together and the others moved out of the shot, squeezing up against the walls.

  “It’s been quite a climb,” I said to camera, when Molly was ready. “And it wouldn’t have happened without the team here. Pierre—pan around.”

  Pierre looked confused at my breaking the fourth wall, but I gestured at him to do it.

  “Molly, Feather, Gemma. And this guy, Ken. Actually I have no idea who he is, but he’s here. And the only reason we’re here at all is our cameraman Pierre, who spotted the opening, said we could do it, and showed us how. So. Thank you, Pierre.”

  I noticed Gemma watching this with an odd expression, but carried on. I walked back toward the opening, indicating that Pierre should show how far up we were.

  “We’re three hundred feet up the wall. Pretty high, but nowhere near the altitude Kincaid mentioned in the Phoenix piece. That could indicate we’re dead wrong, and this is a different feature that nobody happens to have noticed. But I’ve talked before about the idea that Kincaid changed some of the details. He couldn’t help but reveal the cavern’s existence. It’s kind of a big deal. Though maybe he wanted to control the information and keep the place safe from prying eyes. I don’t know. But it’s intriguing. It’s all…very intriguing.”

  I dusted off my hands. “And so I guess now we take a look at what we’ve found.”

  Pierre stopped filming while we got headlamps out of backpacks and Ken and I smoked. Then we organized ourselves into a line with Molly right behind me with the boom mike, Feather and Gemma armed with flashlights to direct at anything that drew my attention, and Pierre free to move around me.

  I walked into the cavern.

  Within a few feet it already felt cooler, but also stuffy. The ceiling was about three feet above my head. There was a dry, dusty odor, the smell of time and old rock. Now that we had light on the space, I could see it was closer to thirty feet wide, and perhaps the same deep. The walls on both sides were a little concave, top to bottom and front to back. The rocky floor was far from even. It was hard to believe the space was wholly a result of natural forces, but I didn’t know enough about geology to be sure.

  “We’ve already noticed these,” I said, indicating the portion that Ken had pointed out earlier. “What could be chisel marks—suggesting a natural feature was enlarged and shaped by human hand. I’d want a field archeologist to pronounce before I went there. The shape of the walls…it looks like people widened it. But natural forces can produce things that look man-made—underwater features like the so-called Bimini Road in the Bahamas, and the Yonaguni Monument off Japan. So all I’m saying is…that’s the way it looks.”

  I walked in a slow circle, illuminating the walls with my headlamp. “I don’t see anything else of note. There’s no symbols or carvings. If this place is indeed what we hope, then this area seems to be a kind of antechamber. Undecorated, utilitarian.”

  I ended with the light on an opening at the end. “The aperture at the back of the cave is about six feet wide. Looks pretty rough from out here, like a natural fissure, tapering sharply toward the top. Let’s go have a closer look.”

  I stepped into the passage.

  I was aware of…a reluctance. Nothing major. Not a big don’t for God’s sake go in there siren. Merely a note of caution, spiraling up from the deep back brain, a little like the feeling I’d had while sitting alone early the previous morning. I was, after all, going where—so far as I knew—no man or woman had boldly gone in a damned long time. And we were a very significant distance underground. There was a heck of a lot of rock over my head, and no way of telling how stable this portion was, or where it led.

  And it was dark. Doesn’t matter how old you get or how much creeping around you’ve done in cemeteries or abandoned insane asylums and other places of self-evident spookiness in pursuit of halfway-watchable online viewing; the dark is the dark is the dark.

  “Kincaid mentioned a passage,” I said. “And he said it was around twelve feet wide. This is narrower. The walls are uneven.
There’s a strong taper toward the top. The floor is bumpy and slopes a little. This could just be a natural fissure. We’re not going to know until we come to the next detail in the account. Kincaid said that fifty-seven feet along a passage from the entrance, he and the other explorers came upon a doorway. That was the gateway to all the strange stuff. So let’s go look.”

  “Or not,” Molly said.

  “What?”

  “Nolan, I don’t like this.”

  Pierre lowered the camera. His face said he was thinking the same as me—that the last person you’d expect to get the jitters was Molly.

  “Moll,” I said, “it’s just a crevice at this stage. I don’t even know if it’s an actual passage.”

  “I don’t like it,” she said stubbornly.

  “Okay,” I said. “And I respect that. But we’re going to head down there anyway, right?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “But…” I didn’t know what to say.

  She stood looking at me, lips pursed. It’s funny how, as you get used to being with people, you stop seeing them. You assign them a role and see that instead. Molly had become Moll, to me—fearless scourge of hotel clerks and rental companies, solid and dependable, the person who made everything happen, who fixed the world when things went awry. The mom of the team. Because of this I think part of me had even assigned her a greater age than mine. Moms are older than you. It’s the law.

  Now I looked at her properly—hair stuck with perspiration to a forehead still angry from yesterday’s sun—and remembered that she was fifteen years my junior. And that she was at least nervous, maybe scared, and really didn’t want to do this.

  “Sure,” I said. “That’s fine. Of course.”

  “I could carry the microphone thing instead, if you wanted,” Feather said diffidently.

  “That’d be great,” I said. “And you know what? This is actually great. Duh. We should have thought of it before. Moll—can you stay here, film us heading up the passage? A little bit of phone-quality coverage would be great to use as a teaser on the blog.”

  “Sure,” she said quietly, handing the boom to Feather. “I’m sorry, Nolan. Really. I know I’m being dumb about this.”

  “Yeah…or else you’re the only one of us who doesn’t get eaten by the huge monster. Time will tell, right?”

  She laughed, and it was okay.

  Feather held up the mike. Molly headed back toward the opening, phone out, ready to film us heading into the gloom, and Pierre got the camera in position again.

  “So let’s do it,” I said.

  We walked down the passage, Gemma shining her flashlight low to make it easier to traverse the increasingly uneven “floor,” Ken now holding Feather’s light to point the way. He counted his steps, too, putting one foot directly in front of the other to yield a rough indication of the distance in feet. The passage soon started to narrow, and by forty feet in, it had reduced to the point where I could almost touch both sides at once.

  The walls began to taper in more markedly above us, too, disappearing into blackness. I was careful to inspect both walls as we passed. They were very ragged, and did not look like they had been worked or refined at any point. There were no openings on either side.

  At about 140 feet into the rock, the passage simply stopped, dead-ending in a slanting wall. This did not look like a designed feature, either. It merely looked like the end of the road.

  “We must have missed it,” Feather said hopefully.

  We trouped all the way back to the antechamber, then turned around and headed in again, more slowly, this time using all available lights to focus on the walls.

  There was no doorway.

  The passage led nowhere.

  Chapter

  15

  You found the cavern, Nolan. Or a cavern. That’s something.”

  Ken and I were sitting near the opening. The vista outside was still beautiful, but I wasn’t seeing it.

  “Yeah,” I said. “‘Something’ is precisely what it is. ‘Some thing.’ And not a very interesting thing, at that.”

  “Don’t be a twat, Nolan. It proves—”

  “It proves shit, Ken. We found a natural feature. It wasn’t where Kincaid said it would be, and it’s nothing like he said it was. For all we know this thing’s already logged and the only reason it’s not on all the maps is that it’s a tedious fucking cave that isn’t worth the effort of the climb.”

  “It is what it is. Or what we spin it as.”

  “Which is what? Can we even get a show out of this?”

  “Dunno. Worst case, we can throw it into a ‘the ones that got away’ bucket show midseason. Or stitch it into a roundup of things you’ve proved don’t exist. You know I think that would help with the haters. ‘The Anomaly Files—Your Dispassionate Seekers After Truth.’”

  “Yeah—and you know I think it’s a crap idea. It’s hard enough getting people to believe in this stuff without handing them proof of absence on a plate.”

  “Nolan’s right,” Feather said. We turned to see her standing a little way behind us.

  Ken shrugged. “It’s your money, love.”

  “Not really,” she said. “I don’t get to make the big calls. But I can tell you what I think. I was a psych major and one thing I learned is you’re never going to change some people’s minds. Some are born cynical and suspicious. They don’t need our help to carry on being deaf and dumb. Nuts to the disbelievers, is what I say. The point of a charity like Palinhem is to make a difference.”

  “Fighting talk,” Ken said. “I like it. But so what now?”

  “You don’t show weakness,” she said resolutely, “and you never give up.”

  “Right on, sister,” Ken said, and I nodded, but all I’d heard was the word “charity.”

  Half an hour later I was by myself having a cigarette before it was time for us all to climb back down the wall. By then I was in less of a snit. It’s not like I’d disproved the existence of aliens or shown that the Knights Templar were only ever a Little League team. Mainly I was just tired and looking forward to a night in a hotel and several beers and sincerely hoping we were leaving in time to make these things possible. I was nearly done with the smoke when Molly crouched beside me.

  “We’re good,” I said. “Seriously. You don’t like tunnels. It’s no big deal.”

  “It is to me. I am not a girl who bails. And to make up for it, I may have something for you.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you like surprises?”

  “Depends what they are.”

  “Just come.”

  She led me toward the back of the cavern. Ken watched us as we passed. “What are you up to?”

  “Dunno,” I said.

  “Well, don’t be long. There is a shower, much alcohol, and a cheeseburger the size of my head waiting for me back at the hotel. All of these things are critical to my future well-being, and you fuck with the prospect at your peril.”

  “Yes, boss.”

  Molly led me right to the back, and spoke in a low tone. “After I did my bugging out thing—” she started.

  “Which I’ve just told you is totall—”

  “Shh, Nolan.”

  “Do you get to tell me to shh like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  “After that, I did what you asked. Faded back, took a bunch of pictures. Which I’ll sling in the production Dropbox when we return to the wonderful world of Wi-Fi. Then I shot some video of you all heading off into the fissure. I’m no Pierre, but it’s HD and usable.”

  “Great. So…”

  “Then you all came back, turned around, and tried again. I was going to stop filming but, you know, always worth having take two, and all that. So I kept going, and came closer to the passage the second time. I even went a little way down. And…well, I’m just going to show it to you.”

  I waited as she navigated on her phone and pressed the button. Murky footage of us all
heading into the inner crevice for the second time. “I’d already covered the basics, so I waved the camera around a little more,” she said. “And I was looking through it a couple minutes ago, and…there.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll play it again.” She held the phone up closer.

  “What am I looking for?”

  “You’ll see Ken pointing the light around all over this place, trying to get you a look at each bit of the walls on either side. In typically chaotic fashion. But what I’m talking about…Look carefully at the end part.”

  It was hard to make out what I was seeing. The backs of the line of people who’d been behind me. Unpredictable slashes of light and dark as Ken and Gemma waved flashlights around, and we got farther and farther from the camera. But then…

  “What was that?”

  She rewound, pressed PLAY again, then PAUSE. “That is what I’m talking about.”

  The freeze frame caught us at the far end of the crevice, a collection of shoulders and backs of heads, quite some distance from the camera. The phone wasn’t dealing well with the low light conditions, and the image was blocky. Toward the top, however, Ken’s light had wandered well above head height—and the area captured in the beam was sharper.

  And for just a moment, it caught something. Three little outcrops, each about the size of a brick, the last directly above the first, the middle one offset, in a left-right-left pattern. We hadn’t been looking up, and so hadn’t noticed them.

  “Don’t those look kind of regular? As if someone at least finished them off a little?”

  “Could be,” I said dubiously. “Though to be honest, Moll…could just be a foreshortening effect. They’re a long way from the camera. This…is all you’ve got?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And probably it’s nothing, I know. But if someone way back did smarten up a few little nodules in the rock—that’s something, at least, isn’t it?”