The Anomaly

by Michael Rutger

  “Come get Molly. Help her across.”

  “What’s happening?”

  I turned to where I thought the doorway was but was hurled backward by a thudding swipe, sharp nails tearing across my chest, shredding through my shirt.

  I landed six feet back in the liquid and barely got half a lungful of air before my head was sinking under the surface. It was the thickness of dishwashing fluid and very warm. I didn’t sink as fast as I would have in water but I had no idea of where I was, or how far I was going to drop.

  After a few seconds I felt hands yanking at me and let them pull me in a direction that turned out to be the right one because a couple of moments later my head was out. I gasped in some air before becoming aware that the room was now full of noise.

  Molly and Pierre were screaming at me to come with them. The creature at the end was full-body roaring now, chaotic with blood-hunger.

  “Ken,” I panted. “I’m going ba—”

  “No,” Pierre said. He kept pulling, and Molly did, too.

  “You heard him,” she said to me from between gritted teeth as they pulled me out of my depth and farther toward the other end. “You heard what Ken said. He said to go. That thing’s going to kill you if you go back—and I’m not letting that happen. I’m not letting it happen.”

  The creature roared again, but wasn’t advancing as quickly as I would have expected—as if wary of the foul gunk we were half drowning in, unsure how to deal with it. It was wading toward us, though—you could feel movement in the liquid. There was only one of them in here, I was sure of that even in the darkness.

  Ken had led the other away, giving us half a chance.

  I still tried to fight Pierre and Molly but I was winded and confused as to which direction to go. Maybe I even knew in my heart of hearts that I had to leave it.

  “You asshole,” I shouted, and tried one last time to get them to let me go, but my voice was thick with tears and I don’t think they could even hear what I said.

  None of us knew we were at the far end until our flailing arms smacked into the rough wall. Molly got out of the liquid first and up into the opening, and she hauled me after her as Pierre pushed my legs from underneath, somehow fit enough to still be treading water.

  Then we were crowded together in the mouth of the fissure, coughing; too out of breath to do anything except suck huge lungfuls of air—lungfuls that were acrid with the thick, noxious smell.

  “I’m going back,” I croaked.

  “No, you’re not,” Pierre said. “You even try, and I’ll knock you out.”

  “Fuck you,” I shouted. “Ken is my—”

  Then we heard it.

  We all heard it, cutting through the roars of the creature at the other end. A shout, or scream. It was high-pitched, awful, human. It came from outside the room we’d just crossed, from back in the main room. He’d gotten that far, at least.

  Then it stopped. Cut off suddenly.

  The creature that had pursued us went silent, and then after a moment we heard it moving quickly away, back toward the corridor, leaving the room to take its share in the spoils.

  “Come on, Nolan,” Molly said gently.

  Pierre found his backpack and picked it up and they pulled me into the fissure with them and we left.

  From the files of Nolan Moore:

  ENGRAVING FROM THE LONDON MAGAZINE, MAY 1766

  Chapter

  48

  We squeezed our way along the crevice. Pierre went first. I went in the middle, using my phone to give us some light. Molly was at the back, and though I heard her doing her breathing thing a couple of times, it seemed recent events had blown her disquiet at claustrophobic darkness out of the water. I guess that’ll happen when you’ve been reminded that there are far worse things. Eventually we emerged into the gallery. We stood a moment, catching our breath.

  “That doesn’t look good,” Molly said.

  She was talking about my chest. There were deep gashes across it, an inch apart, from the claws of the thing that’d nearly taken me down. They were bleeding heavily. I looked at the mess with indifference. It didn’t matter and there was nothing I could do about it.

  “Ken gave us no choice,” she said quietly.

  “I know. And when I see him in heaven, I’m going to punch him in the face for it.”

  Molly’s chin was trembling. She pursed her lips defiantly. “Actually, I hope it’s hell. It’d be much more his kind of thing. And you’d adapt fast enough.”

  I was surprised into something like a laugh. I started to speak but couldn’t work out what I could possibly say.

  Pierre meanwhile looked upon the paintings for the first time. You can read people’s thoughts sometimes. That’s not a magical or supernatural ability. You merely have to know them. I saw him thinking that he had to capture these things, get them on disk—as well lit and photographed as he could—so others could see them. So that the world would know. Then I saw him remember he didn’t have the camera, and who’d last been holding it, and firmly drop the entire line of thought.

  He walked along the wall, however, holding his phone up high and looking at each in turn. “Mosquito,” he said. “Bug. Coyote or wolf. A horse with a horn. The squid-thing that nearly got me. And that…That’s what Gemma had inside her.”

  It was the picture I’d noticed the first time, something like a bird, but with an odd, bony head. “I guess.”

  “But there’s millions of species on Earth,” Molly said. “A hundred buttons isn’t enough.”

  “Maybe you can combine them,” I said. “String together sequences or something. Or this is the starting set, and then evolution takes over. Don’t know.”

  The light passed across a picture I hadn’t seen before, right at the end, past the hands. It was stylized, hard to discern, especially in the feeble light of a phone screen. It wasn’t something that had been found in the fossil record, that’s for sure—unless the archeologists involved had elected not to mention it on the grounds that it would be likely to freak people out.

  It was exactly like the figure I’d pointed out to Gemma on the picture of Newspaper Rock. Short horns. Built like a bear, bulky and powerful across the back. Its shoulders were bunched, gripping hands directed downward.

  Short horns. Like the pictogram I’d spotted in the first pool room, and then as the only available option on the wall outside the much bigger one half an hour ago.

  “Let’s get to the end and see what there is to see,” I said. I unthinkingly left a beat, used as I was to leaving space for someone else to speak, either to back up what I’d said or else suggest a—usually better—alternative course of action. Or swear. Or talk about cheeseburgers.

  The regrets kept coming in waves, deeper each time. If only we hadn’t lost time looking at the bigger pool, trying to work out a way of getting a drink that in the end didn’t happen anyway. If only I’d gotten his point about Feather overhearing us more quickly. Or he hadn’t made me slog there. If only we hadn’t gone back for the hard drives.

  I realized I wasn’t going anywhere useful, and I would end up being a liability to the others if I kept swirling around the vortex. The past is full of if-onlys and they’re all bullshit. You only think that way when it’s too late. You only if-only, as Ken would have said, when you’re already screwed.

  So I shoved them all to the deep back of my mind and we hurried to the end of the room.

  Soon after the point we’d reached on our first visit, the gallery tapered in rapidly from both sides. After another ten feet it ended abruptly in a narrow crevice—this distant end of the room, like this entire space, showing no sign of the workmanship so evident throughout the rest of the complex. There was no way through the crack. I shoved my hand into it and found an extra pocket of space beyond, but my fingers reached the end of that, too. There was no way forward.

  There was a dull crunching sound under my feet when I moved, and I turned the light down in that direction.

  “W
hat…are they?” Molly said.

  I squatted down. “Bones.”

  “From…”

  “The last people who got stuck in here, presumably. The ones who made the paintings. While they waited to…”

  There were five skulls that I could see. Five full skeletons. I’d just trodden through more Neolithic bones than had ever been discovered in the rest of the world, put together. Bones of the beings that had huddled together here at the end of this cavern, waiting for the end. Recording what they’d seen, until they ran out of energy. Until they starved and died.

  “What now?” Pierre said. He hadn’t said a word about Ken since it happened, but he didn’t have to. The underlying panic in his voice said it all. Suddenly the ground beneath his feet had disappeared, and he knew it, and he wasn’t sure that I represented a viable plan B. “What the hell now?”

  Molly took the phone from him and pointed it upward. This showed a sheer, narrow wall of jagged rock, stretching up into darkness. “It has to be up there,” she said.

  “Or we’re just plain wrong,” I said. “And Feather overheard it some way we’ve forgotten or she wasn’t answering my question after all.”

  “That idea sucks,” she said, handing the phone to me. “And I’m bored with things sucking.”

  She squared up to the wall. Found sufficient hold with both hands to start inching her way up, using the wall opposite to patch together a half-assed chimney climb. She was breathing hard before she’d even gone a few feet. She looked very different from the girl who’d confidently made her way up the canyon wall when we’d spotted the entrance to this place. Skinnier, beyond exhausted, someone at the end of her resources but giving it one last try because that’s what you do, rather than in any hope of success.

  I wished we’d drunk some water from the bigger pool, with our hands if necessary. It was hard to see how it could have made the situation worse. But that was another if-only.

  “See anything?” I realized this was a dumb question as soon as it was out of my mouth. The source of light was still in my hand. I held it higher, hoping I wouldn’t be called upon to do any fast thinking soon.

  “Nope.”

  Pierre rooted around in his pack and pulled out the remaining flashlight. This about doubled the height of the wall we could see, to perhaps twenty feet. No opening was visible. To my inexperienced eye there was little in the way of handholds, either. There was no guarantee there would be any way out of here, of course—and the former inhabitants of the bones around my feet evidently hadn’t found one. This wasn’t a video game, some tough but resolvable puzzle constructed for recreational amusement. There didn’t have to be a way out. Even if Feather genuinely had overheard us this way, it didn’t mean there was a way up or down from whatever speculated opening might be above.

  I kept this thought to myself.

  Suddenly Pierre turned his head. “What was that?”

  “What?”

  He held a hand up for silence.

  I heard it then. A howling, yipping noise, echoing from the fissure at the other end of the gallery.

  “Sounds like coyotes,” Molly said, voice matter-of-fact but straining with effort as she kept heading upward.

  “Fuck. Can coyotes swim?”

  “Oh yeah. They’ll get across that room easily. And they’ll attack just about anything if they’re hungry enough.”

  I grabbed the light from Pierre and told him to start climbing.

  “But you’re not going to be able to—”

  “Just do it, Pierre. I’ll be right behind.”

  Molly started flapping out with her hands, grabbing at anything that might serve as a hold, moving as quickly as she could. Pierre started up the wall. There was no question he was the better climber, and still pretty strong.

  I alternated between watching what he was doing—in the laughable hope of replicating his moves—and glancing toward the other end of the gallery. The snarling sounds were getting closer, echoing strangely from the fissure. It sounded like there were more than two throats involved. Maybe things didn’t only leave this ark two by two after all. Maybe once it was activated, it kept going. A first pair, and then further pairs, until the balls of elements were used up—in the smaller pool, and then the vastly bigger one, and perhaps others we hadn’t found—until it had produced a sufficient population for the creatures to start reproducing by themselves. To repopulate the Earth.

  “Light, Nolan!”

  I redirected it upward again. Molly was more than twenty feet up the wall now. “I see something. There’s…There’s an opening up here! There’s an opening!”

  “Great. Keep going,” I said as calmly as I could, knowing that with the panting and the pounding of blood in her ears, she had no idea how close the animals were to us.

  “I see it,” Pierre said. “Nolan, start climbing. We can take it from here without light.”

  Maybe they could. I wasn’t so sure about me. I’m not a climber. Especially not in the dark. But I guess you play these things through to the end.

  I stuck the light in my mouth and reached out for the holds that I’d seen him use. I pulled up off the ground, and immediately slipped back down again.

  The coyotes—assuming that’s what they were—weren’t howling anymore. That wasn’t because they’d given up and turned around. They knew they’d found something worth pursuing. They probably even knew, in that spooky way animals do, that their prey wasn’t in a position to run.

  They were closing in, coming forward in the darkness.

  I could hear feet trotting along the rock floor now, and I smiled to myself, sensing that—whether it be heaven or hell—it was likely I was going to get a chance to punch Ken in his spectral face a lot sooner than I might have hoped.

  “For God’s sake, Nolan!” Pierre shouted, breaking me back to awareness. “Climb.”

  I tried again on the handholds, using all the strength I had. I felt my fingers slipping once more but reached up and grabbed, and then again, pulling up and up, getting my right foot onto the lowest ledge. Got a few feet higher but then felt myself losing it again, toppling backward, not sure I could do anything about it, as the scrabbling paws got closer.

  I threw my hand up and found another hold but it wasn’t enough to keep me tight to the rock. I felt myself starting to fall and tried to twist in toward the wall, hearing Molly shouting down at me, no content in her words, only urgency.

  I thought I was going to tumble to the ground but I felt my back thud into the opposite wall and realized I’d gotten far enough up to use it like a chimney. I reached behind with one hand and pushed up with my feet, inching up, trying to get far enough from the floor that I couldn’t be jumped at.

  I twisted around to look below at the exact moment something launched itself up at me.

  The beam of the light in my mouth slashed across the slavering face of a coyote, or something like one, leaping up at me. Its jaws were wide and rife with teeth. It had an extra eye, not quite centered, in its forehead.

  “Oh dear God.” My voice was muffled around the light.

  “What?” Molly called, panicky.

  “Never mind.”

  The next lunge, from a different creature, nearly reached me, and in trying to turn away I slipped—but only a couple of inches. I pulled and shoved and inched my back up the wall, in a cacophony of howls and strangled barks—until I heard Pierre shout at me to shove off from the back wall and throw my weight in his direction.

  I did, and felt his hand grab me firmly around the wrist. He pulled as I pushed up with my feet. My wrists scraped across a jagged edge and I knew I was almost there.

  Molly started pulling now, too, but then there was a deep, shuddering thud—something that reverberated through the rock as if a meteor had landed on the Earth’s surface high above. If they hadn’t been holding me I would have tumbled straight down the wall again.

  I scrabbled up over the edge and into another fissure.

  “What was that?”
Molly asked.

  I shrugged and headed onward, trying not to think about the owners of the bones below, or how close they had been to finding a way up. And maybe out.

  Chapter

  49

  The fissure we found ourselves in was taller and wider than the one between the smelling room and the gallery. Though apparently natural, and far from straight, in the dim light from the phone it showed signs of having been worked. I found this reassuring, insofar as I was capable of experiencing that emotion, because it suggested a route of sufficient importance to have merited the effort.

  All three of us were stumbling now, using our hands to support ourselves along the wall as we lurched as quickly as we could along the tunnel. There were further distant thudding noises. It was hard to be sure, but these felt as though they were caused by impacts at a level below us.

  “Is that what it sounded like? What you heard in the night?”

  “Yes,” Pierre said. “Similar, anyway. It’s the balls dropping into that bigger pool, isn’t it?”

  “I think so. The site is stepping up to phase two.”

  “Which means more of those things are going to appear,” Molly said.

  “Lots more. The console in the first pool room implied a hundred types. We haven’t seen anywhere near that number. The bigger pool only had one option on offer. Could be that’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “Something bad, with horns. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “Are you…okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. That wasn’t true, of course. I was in an increasing amount of pain. The gashes across my chest felt like they were burning hot. Either that or very cold. I wasn’t sure. Nerve endings in tearing discomfort, either way, and the sensation was spreading down from the slashes into the muscles of my stomach wall, burying itself deeper. I didn’t see any point in sharing this information.

  “I don’t believe you,” she said.