The Anomaly

by Michael Rutger

  I felt something turn over in my stomach. A liquid sensation. Not a repercussion of drinking water from the pool, but a beat of low, intense uncertainty. A recognition that it wouldn’t take much for our situation to morph from not great to really very bad indeed.

  I stomped down on the thought. “What’s plan B?”

  “The only one I’ve got is…”

  “Asking her to swim it?”

  “Yeah. Which is a big ask. But she could get down to that beach we camped on, and wait. Scream her head off at the next boat to come down the river. And yes, we have no way of telling how long that could take. But unless you’ve got something smarter up your billowy sleeve…”

  “Yeah, right. You’re the brains of this operation.”

  “That’s what worries me. Because I have my limitations, and there’s a danger this situation is about to get shitty, Nolan.”

  He looked at me. “As in, not very good at all.”

  Chapter

  26

  I don’t know what time it was when I woke. I’d finally remembered to power down my phone and didn’t want to turn it back on for fear of waking someone. I lay on my back for a while in the darkness, remembering a story I’d heard once about a guy who’d been on one of the moon missions and had a dream while he was there. In it he was driving the moon buggy and started to realize he could see something coming toward him. Gradually he understood that it was another buggy. He kept watching, warily, and eventually he realized that the guy driving it…was him.

  I remembered hearing this story and thinking how mind-melting it must have been to undergo that dream, and wake up and think…Ah, okay, it was just a dream. But then to remember moments later: Wait, Christ—I’m on the moon.

  Waking to find myself trapped inside a prehistoric artifact created by a culture (or cultures) unknown—our only hope of escape being a South African raft captain, whereabouts also currently uncertain…it felt kind of the same.

  We’d stayed up a couple more hours after Feather’s return. Talking about this and that, speculating about the purpose of what we’d found, remembering previous expeditions. Ken spent a while reminiscing in lavish detail about some of his most memorable cheeseburgers, until everyone turned and looked at him. We each took half an hour sitting down by the stone ball, talking with Feather on the other side.

  It was during my stint that she fell asleep, or at least stopped responding. I’d like to think it’s because I have a nice voice and a soothing, reassuring manner. It could be that I’m unbelievably dull.

  By then everyone else was beat. And hungry and thirsty. It was agreed that sleeping was the obvious way of trying to ignore those facts, and of bringing on tomorrow more quickly.

  We each took our own backpack for a pillow and stretched out in a patch of space in the main room. You might think it’d take a while to get to sleep in such circumstances. Not for me. It was dark, and very quiet. I was exhausted. And there wasn’t anything else that could be done. I am a shambles of a human being in many ways, shackled with a personality that’s at best a rough first draft, but I’ve always been able to ignore problems over which I presently have no control. Which admittedly often includes “life in general.”

  After subsequently waking and lying there for twenty minutes, I became aware of a quiet sound off to my right. I’d made a guess at who it might be before I heard the steady cadence of her breathing—a rhythm interrupted every now and then by a quiet hitching sound as she started to hyperventilate and had to bring it under control again.

  I sat up. Patted my hand around until I found the small lanyard light I’d placed nearby. Crawled over, taking my time and not trying to be super quiet, to give Molly a chance to realize I was coming her way. When I was up close I reached out in the darkness and by chance found her hand.

  “Come with me,” I whispered.

  I guided her by the shoulder toward where I thought the doorway would be, and missed by only a few yards. When we were in the passage I walked for thirty feet or so before turning on the light, keeping it low and in front.

  Molly blinked and squinted against the glow. “What are you doing? Why are we here?”

  She’d kept her voice low, and I did, too. “Want to show you something.”

  “I don’t want to go up there.”

  “You should at least see,” I said.

  “Really, Nolan. I don’t want to.”

  “Well, I’m going. If you want to go back and sit there fretting in the dark, be my guest.”

  I started walking again. After a few seconds, she followed.

  I led her along to the last doorway on the left, and then into the narrower passage beyond. “Careful,” I said, when I knew we must be getting close.

  I turned the light to the floor and stopped walking when I saw it abruptly disappear. Then raised the light so it shone across the pool.

  She looked out over the water. With only this single, weaker light, it looked less clear than earlier. And without being able to see the sides, like nothing more than a pool of standing water in a cave, of a type she’d doubtless encountered any number of times as a kid on road trips with Californian parents. She gazed out at it nonetheless.

  “And that other stuff—it’s at the far end?”

  “Yeah.”

  She reached down to pull her T-shirt over her head.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  She undid her jeans and pushed them down, too. “I’m not trying to sleep in wet clothes afterward.”

  “Okay then.”

  “I am wearing underwear. You’ll cope.”

  I stood there dithering, wondering whether to do the same. It’d taken a long while for my clothes to dry off after the last time. By the time I’d decided, she’d already launched herself off the edge and into the pool, in a practiced shallow dive.

  I transferred everything of importance to my shirt pocket and let myself gently down off the edge, still fully clothed, feeling like her granddad.

  “Did you notice every one of these is different?”

  We’d walked around the spheres. She agreed that each looked like it was a different type of metal or mineral. She was now standing at the rock in the middle and talking about the pictograms carved on its top surface.

  I joined her. She was right. It didn’t leap out at you because each of the composite forms was somewhat complex, a combination of between four and six individual symbols. At a guess I’d say there were thirty or forty of these component images. Some simple geometric signs, others that looked like a sheaf of wheat, or an oval with six tiny lines coming out of it—a stylized sun, or perhaps a sacred bug or something, as I’d speculated last time I was here. The human mind seeks patterns, so when you look at the surface you tend to see uniformity—the repetition of the constituent symbols. It took a little longer to appreciate there was uniqueness within the bigger picture. Each of the hundred icons was different.

  “Huh.”

  “There’s a smear on it.”

  A small brown smudge across the top. “Gemma was dripping blood from that scrape on her arm,” I said.

  “So what is this thing?”

  “I don’t know. A dictionary. A galactic genesis myth. A grain inventory. Somebody with tenure will work it out.”

  “Assuming anybody else ever sees it.”

  Even though I’d thought this myself earlier, I gently trod on the idea. “Which they will, Molly. Obviously.”

  “Nolan—how are we going to get out of here?”

  “Tomorrow morning Feather will go look for Dylan again. If he’s not there…I talked to her about the idea of climbing down and waiting there all day, or maybe swimming downriver. She’s willing to do either.”

  “But where the hell did Dylan go?”

  She sounded petulant, betrayed, and young. That and the fact she was standing there in wet underwear made her seem very unlike Molly Mom.

  “He went to organize more food. It took longer than expected. In addition, possibly, the raft wa
s too hard to work by himself in more hectic waters. He will, maybe even as we speak, be resolving one or both of those problems. He’ll be there bright and early tomorrow morning, and our situation will rapidly start to improve.”

  She looked up at me hopefully. “You think so?”

  “You met the guy, Moll. He has a great big ego, and with that comes pride. He’s not just going to bail.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “Molly—what’s the deal here? I mean, you don’t have to tell me. But you can if you want.”

  She looked away, at the symbols. Then pushed back from the stone and wandered to the edge of the platform. She sat down, pulled her knees up, and wrapped her arms around them.

  I came and sat cross-legged a few feet away. Took out a cigarette. Eleven left now. I frugally lit up with a match from the book I’d found, reasoning that it was a good idea to conserve my lighter as much as possible. As I did so I noticed the book was from a bar in Santa Monica—the one Kristy and I had finished up in, the night I bailed from the movie industry, in fact. I know the owner a little and he’s a bad-tempered asshole, prone to fight any form of opposition—and signs of “progress” in particular—with both fists. Hence still printing his own matchbooks, years after you were last allowed to smoke in a bar in LA. I realized there were probably drinkers in their twenties now who simply didn’t understand why bars had matchbooks. It’d be like having menus in places that had never sold food. We live among fossils and rock paintings and ancient signs, wherever we are.

  I sat smoking for a while, Molly looking out at the water.

  “You know…” she said eventually, “I don’t even know. I mean, I know what it’s supposed to be. The issue. I’ve been over it. With people whose job it is to know how to get to the other side of that kind of thing. And I have. And it’s not like it’s so terrible. It’s really, really not. It’s barely anything. And nothing lurid. This is not NSFW material.”

  “That’s a relief. Not a Bad Uncle story, then.”

  “My uncle’s awesome,” she said. “He taught me to surf. But actually…he is kind of relevant. Though he doesn’t know it. Look, bottom line, there was this night. When I was a kid. I was seven years old. And I woke up.”

  She stopped. Breathed in, breathed out.

  And then she told me.

  Chapter

  27

  Normally I’d just go back to sleep,” she went on. “I was good like that. My brothers had already worn out the needing-to-be-nursed-back-to-sleep routine. By the time I came along my parents were done with that crap. On this night I’m talking about, I tried, but it didn’t feel right. Something about the house, about the world…it just didn’t feel right.

  “So I got out of bed. I figured I’d go to my parents, get one of them to come tuck me in. Though when I was on my feet I remembered it would have to be Mom, because Dad was away in San Francisco. Which was fine—she was better at it anyway. So I left my room and padded along the corridor and into their room. Went up to her side of the bed. I got real close to it before I realized…she wasn’t there.

  “The bed was mussed up—my dad’s a bear for remaking the thing every day, and I’m the same now. Takes two minutes, and it’s so much nicer. But when he was away, my mother didn’t bother. So I couldn’t tell whether she’d been in bed and gotten up, or hadn’t made it there yet. She had a little clock radio that my brothers and I bought her for Christmas. It said it was 1:20 a.m. Which was very late. I knew sometimes she’d stay up when Dad was away, though, watching a movie. So maybe that was it. But it meant going downstairs to get her. I kind of didn’t want to do that. I was awake enough now that the house felt big and dark and weird. And awake enough that I’d remembered my brothers weren’t at home, either. One was at a birthday sleepover, the other on a seventh-grade trip to Yosemite. So it was just me and Mom. Earlier, at dinner, that seemed cool, and we’d joked about being girls home alone. But now…I really wanted her to be there in her bed. I didn’t want to have to go find her by myself in the dark. But I also knew I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep now without being tucked in. You know how it is when you’re a kid. Things like that become nonnegotiable. So…I went downstairs.

  “They’ve downsized now, but our house back then was a big place. And very quiet. I went down the stairs anyway. There was a little light to see by because they always left a couple small lamps on. I went to the living room. She wasn’t there. I went to the kitchen. She wasn’t there. And then I thought, duh, she’ll be in the family room, watching TV. But she wasn’t.”

  She looked at me. “She wasn’t anywhere.”

  “You mean…What do you mean?”

  “She wasn’t in the house. At all. I looked in every room. She wasn’t there. I even looked in the garage, though I found it pretty scary even in the daytime. She wasn’t there, either. She wasn’t anywhere. I was alone in the house.”

  “Christ. So…what did you do?”

  “What could I do? I freaked the hell out. But very quietly. I checked every room again. Upstairs and down. I started crying. I kept searching, getting more and more scared. I tried to work out what I’d done wrong. I finally wound up sitting halfway up the stairs, curled in a little ball. Knowing I was alone now, and she was never coming back. That none of them were.

  “Dad had gone first. Then my brothers—they were part of it, too. Part of some plan they’d kept secret from me. Then tonight, my mom had left. What I’d thought had been my family was not. They had all gone. And so I sat and cried as quietly as I could so nothing would hear and come get me, feeling like I was in a dark and lonely cave, wondering what was going to happen. Because slowly I realized maybe they hadn’t abandoned me after all, but something had come and gotten them—or gotten my mom, at least. A monster in the dark. Who’d taken her, and sooner or later would come back for me. After a while I even thought I could hear it. Smell it. Coming closer. And closer. Hidden in the darkness. Standing over me.”

  She hugged her arms more tightly around her knees. “And then…I heard a sound outside the house and the door unlocked and my mom walked right in. I didn’t move. Couldn’t move. I stared down at her. She didn’t look like my mom anymore. Because she hadn’t been there, you know? That world was dead and gone to me now. That world and those people. This was something that just looked the way my mom used to. Some stranger, letting herself into the house.

  “Maybe this was even the creature, I thought, in disguise.

  “But then she saw me sitting there and came running up the stairs and I said I thought she’d gone forever and she hugged me so tight it hurt and said she’d never ever leave me and then made me warm milk and took me to my room and tucked me in and slept there in bed with me, right through the night.”

  “Where had she been?”

  “My uncle—he’s my dad’s brother—lived ten miles away up the coast. He’d gotten home late, and only when his ride had driven away did he realize he’d locked himself out. My mother didn’t have to explicitly explain that he was drunk. Didn’t happen all the time, but, well, it did once in a while. We kids were used to it. He was fun when he was drunk. And responsible enough to stay away from his car. So he walked back down to the highway and found a public phone and she drove up there with spare keys to his house, and came back. She considered waking me before she went, thought she could get away with it, decided not to. She called it wrong. That’s all.”

  “Christ, Moll. I’m sorry.”

  “For what? I survived a nonevent.”

  “It evidently doesn’t feel that way.”

  She smiled. “And that’s what therapy boils down to in the end, right? Plus…there’s a little more. A few days later it was all but forgotten. Mom and I agreed next morning the rest of the family didn’t need to hear about what happened, because my brothers would make fun of me for getting upset and thinking I’d been abandoned. They could be assholes about that kind of stuff, call me a baby, you know. And they were home now, my dad was back, and
the universe had been restored to its proper functioning, so whatever.

  “And so I’m out playing in the yard on this particular evening, and I hear Mom and Dad chatting in the kitchen while they’re fixing dinner, those sounds that make you feel comfortable and at home and as if everything is good and simple and always will be. And Dad is telling her how he met Uncle Pete’s new boyfriend in the city and they all had a few after-dinner drinks together, and he seems really nice, and Mom said that’s great, Pete deserves to be with a kind person for once, and eventually the conversation moved on to other things. And I stopped playing, and sat there. And thought for a while. And then I started playing again, and life rolled on.”

  She turned her head and looked at me, eyebrow raised.

  “I don’t get it.”

  She waited.

  “The fact he was gay?”

  “God, no. That was a known thing. Uncle Pete was stridently homosexual, always had been. Nobody ever tried to hide it or acted like it was a big deal.”

  “Okay, so?”

  “My folks live in San Diego now. But I grew up in Santa Cruz.”

  “I know it well. I’m from Berkeley.”

  “Right. And so you’ll also know that if you live in the Bay Area there is one place—and one place only—that you’ll hear referred to as ‘the city.’”

  It didn’t take long for me to get it. “Your dad was talking about his recent business trip to San Francisco.”

  “Only time he went to the city overnight that year.”

  “And if your uncle was up there with his new guy, it seemed unlikely to you that your mother could simultaneously be letting him into his own house, alone, sixty miles away.”

  “Yes.”

  “Huh. So?”

  “I don’t know. I never found out. I didn’t ask, obviously. But I thought back and I realized it had been her idea not to mention her being out to the rest of the family. She’d been subtle, and loving—she knew how my brothers made fun of me for every little thing—but still, it was her idea and she was unusually firm about it. I don’t know where she was that night. But she went out, and I don’t think it was just for a moonlit drive, because she could have said so. She went to see someone.”