I headed for the center line on the grounds that’d give me a better chance of glimpsing Ken’s head again—assuming that’s what it had been—and the water would be traveling faster there.
And yes—there it was, still thirty feet ahead of me. It was definitely Ken: He had his head tipped back, trying to gasp in air, and was thrashing about with both arms.
He went under, then reappeared—barely breaking the surface this time. And he was farther away.
“Swim, you bastard!” I shouted, but he couldn’t hear, and he couldn’t do it anyway.
I put my head down and kicked, pulling through the water with my arms until I was closer to the middle of the river and starting to move more quickly.
Ken’s head popped up again but now I could hear him choking, coughing water up out of his lungs. His arms were barely moving at all.
I stopped trying to fight the water, relinquishing any attempt to influence the path it had in mind for me. I hadn’t been making much difference anyway. Instead I kicked and used my arms to lift my torso, keeping a fix on Ken’s head.
But then it was gone again.
And this time it didn’t come back up.
I dived, going under the surface crooked, immediately bent around by a strong side current. It was pitch dark under there, swirling with bubbles, incomprehensible.
There was no way I could hope to find him. I was not even certain that I’d be able to find my own way back to the surface, turned around as I now was.
It was so very dark, black-green, and felt again like one of those places where there never was and never would be the promise of light. It seemed to be getting colder, and even darker, the void creeping in from the edges of my mind again.
A darker patch.
Ahead, a blacker black within the darkness.
And then it was more visible, as we turned a corner in the river and enough moonlight penetrated to make out the shape properly. I struck out for it, knowing I didn’t have much air left, but that even if I could get to the surface to top up there was no chance of then finding again what I could see ten feet in front of me now.
A shape, floating swiftly downward, arms up over his head, legs pulled out in front by a competing current. Eyes open. Trying to keep his mouth shut.
I kicked and pulled myself through the last yards and got an arm around his chest from behind. I hoped he’d be able to help, just a bit, but his mouth was cracking open and air leaking out, and I’m not sure he even knew I was there.
I looped out behind me with the other arm, pulling against the water, kicking out spastically until I smacked a foot into something below—and I knew, with absolute certainty, that one of the aquatic things from the pool up in the site had somehow gotten out ahead of us, that there was a hidden waterway connecting the two and it was now here in the dark depths and ready to pull us down with it.
But then my other foot connected, and from the way it slid I realized it was scraping the bottom of the river instead.
My lungs were bursting and my ears full of a high, singing note that was getting louder and louder, but I shoved my feet against the rocks below, one after the other, until my head crested the surface.
Ken’s came up with it and he was coughing and spluttering but still alive, and I kept driving my feet down, leaning back against the water, again and again, until suddenly more of me was out than in and I was stumbling backward. We fell together against the rocky side of the river.
I tugged my arm against Ken’s chest, snapping it hard—provoking a gush of water out of his mouth, and more coughing and retching. I was coughing, too, burning wet barks that felt as though my guts were coming up.
And then we were only panting, chests hitching up and down, slowly bringing our breathing back to normal.
“Cheers, Nolan.”
“You’re wel—Oh shit,” I said.
“What?”
“Molly.”
I pushed Ken around to go in front in case the opposing current got the better of him. We kept close to the bank, grabbing any outcrops we could find, pulling our way around stubby trees when they forced us into the river, fighting our way upstream as fast as we could.
Finally we turned the bend and saw the raft tilted up, still half-over the dingy. We ran up onto the beach, legs giving out underneath us.
“No!” Ken shouted.
There was a figure lying on the ground.
A woman was kneeling astride her, holding up the knife for one more hack into the figure’s chest.
She looked up as she heard us coming, eyes bright and wide in a face splattered with blood.
“That’s enough, Molly,” I said.
But she brought the knife down into Feather one more time.
From the files of Nolan Moore:
Chapter
56
Five days later I woke from a dream.
I won’t describe it in detail because much of it was muddy and confused and because other people’s dreams are always boring, like their coincidences. Both gain resonance through their roots in the individual’s history and character: Unless you’re that person you simply won’t get it, or understand why a dream might feel like it enshrines insights or judgments out of reach to the conscious mind. I’ll give you the gist. It had been the same three nights in a row. It was quite direct. I’m a pretty simple guy.
I was somewhere utterly dark. There was a sense of a dreadful secret, something I’d done that would color everything forever. Though I could see nothing, I knew I was in a tunnel, and there were two directions I could choose to go.
One led to the outside, to escape, to freedom.
The other led back to the bad thing.
I wanted to go the first way, of course. I started crawling that way in the fetid dark. But I realized there could be no release in that direction, no future worth inhabiting, unless I dealt with what was behind. So I laboriously maneuvered myself around in the cramped, dusty passage and set off in the other direction, back toward the bad thing. I crawled and crawled, squeezing myself into the ever-tighter and more claustrophobic tunnel into the past.
But I couldn’t find it. The bad thing wasn’t there anymore.
Except…it was, really. It was just farther. It would always be farther. Always just out of reach.
Because what’s done is done.
I woke for good a little before five a.m. Though it was not yet dawn, my bedroom wasn’t fully dark. Since returning to Santa Monica I’ve left the drapes wide open at night.
I put on sweat pants and a hoodie and made a thermos of coffee. Rounded up my cigarettes and a lighter and went for a walk. A few minutes from my apartment will get you to the promenade along the beach. At that time of day there’s nobody around but lunatic joggers taking pre-pre-meetings via earpieces and homeless people spread-eagled on the grass or determinedly shoving a shopping cart loaded with their inexplicable possessions. The previous morning—when I’d woken at a similar time, after a similar night—I’d turned right, toward the pier.
So this morning I went left, toward Venice Beach.
I walked slowly. I hadn’t appreciated until I got back to LA just how many parts of me were hurting, or how much. Not only from blows or collisions with tunnel walls in the closing stages, but additional discomforts right back to the spasm incurred when Gemma nearly fell off the wall on our first ascent to the cavern. Too many aches to count. You don’t notice the toll life’s taking while it’s happening. Only when it stops.
I’d also lost seven pounds, and it’d been several days before I was anything like hydrated again. For thirty-six hours I’d labored under a dangerously high temperature, too, feeling as though there was something literally burning in my veins. It’s possible that was the case—that the claws of the thing that had gashed my chest had been carrying microorganisms from the pool. The fever got so bad that I considered going to the doctor, though I suspected any antibiotics they dispensed would have little chance of tackling bacteria that had presumably neve
r been seen before. So I sat it out, wrapped in a blanket and sweating, and finally it started to fade.
I’m not sure it was a case of my body winning. It’s equally likely the same thing happened to those microscopic invaders as to their much larger counterparts in the tunnels. Their programming failed, or the balls Pierre and I managed to get out of the pool led to systemic failures down the line. They died, fell apart, decayed.
Perhaps obsolescence was built into them. Perhaps it’s built into all of us.
I felt a little better this morning, thankfully. The body was doing its thing in the aftermath—repairing damage, restoring equilibrium. The equilibrium of a man in his forties doesn’t exactly make you feel like a young god, but I’ll take it. I’ll take it gladly.
The mind tries to do the same, to return to balance, and part of this is a conscious process. I had thought back over what happened, many times. Portions of the experience in the canyon were already hard to access with clarity. Points of detail, the sharp edges of real things happening in real time, get sanded off in recollection. You wear them out. This is a normal function of the brain, the thing that enables us to stay sane after trauma. Exhaustion and dehydration amplify the effect. Parts of those days felt as dreamlike as what I’d encountered in the night.
But I knew they hadn’t been a dream.
The portions that most occupied me will not surprise you. I had not anticipated that I would ever look down to see my hands gripped around the throat of someone whose existence I had brought to a halt. Nor that I would have to gently pry a ten-inch chef’s knife from a woman’s hand, blood dripping from it onto the coarse sand of a hidden beach. After Ken helped Molly to her feet, and Pierre limped over, the four of us stood in a silence that was long and profound.
Then we had to make a decision about how to proceed.
After a long discussion we loaded Feather’s body onto the dinghy and took it back upriver. Then Molly and I hauled her up the wall to the opening of the cavern. Feather had been slight of build, but no dead person is ever light. Bodies, like past life events, turn into black holes, sucking the gravity of the future into themselves.
We made it, barely. It took forever, pulling and pushing the body a foot at a time, and it was very, very tough. We laid her out in the antechamber cave inside the cavern, and though she had not only meant us grave harm but tried hard to bring it to pass, the knowledge that we were going to leave her there was still dreadful.
But what was the alternative? Neither burying her on the beach nor throwing her in the river was safe. The only other option was taking her with us when we struck out down the canyon the next morning—a far longer and more arduous journey—handing both her and ourselves in to the cops when we reached civilization.
Molly was all for doing this, and Pierre, too. She’d tried to kill us, they said. We were in the right. The police would see that. Ken and I weren’t so sure. Of course hiding a corpse felt terrible. But even if we claimed we’d come upon the body of a stranger, our own battered state would provoke an investigation, with us as the prime suspects. A check at the hotel would reveal that Molly had booked five rooms, too. The only chance we’d have of escaping from the situation would be to tell the truth—including about what we’d found.
Again, Pierre and Molly were all for this. Couldn’t see why we wouldn’t, in fact. Get everything out in the open. Tell the world. Shed a light.
Perhaps you have to be a little older to realize some things should remain in the dark. That the world at large isn’t ready for them, can’t be trusted with their care, and they need to be kept hidden. At any cost.
After we’d climbed back down to the dinghy there was further discussion, which I eventually put on hold by saying at least Feather’s body would be safe there. If we decided we needed to go the other route, we could tell the authorities where she could be found.
We dozed away the remaining hours of night, and next morning set off up the river. We hiked back up the canyon wall to the top. We got back to the hotel and retrieved our belongings. We came home.
I’d thought I had been comfortable with the decision we’d made in the canyon. As the days slowly passed back home, however, it became clear that I was not.
There were two bodies lying in darkness. Three, if you included Gemma, or what was left of her—assuming anything except dust remained of her and Dylan, after the purifying fire the site had unleashed upon itself. Gemma’s death had not been our fault but that only made it worse. It doesn’t matter how deep you bury an incriminating letter in the trash, it’s still there. It doesn’t matter how far you push a body back into a tunnel, either. That’s still there, too.
Even if it has been destroyed, it’s still there.
You know this already. You’ll have bodies stashed in tunnels of your own. Things you’ve done, mistakes you’ve made, secrets you hold—the guilt you carry for moments that stick out in your past like black stars in the firmament of your inner life. The outlier occurrences. The anomalies. The events you look back upon in disbelief, wondering how the hell they could have come to pass, and if they can be made to fit in a story you are prepared to own.
But the truth is you get where you’re going not through the long, forgettable years of sticking to the path, but through the moments when you wander off it. It’s the things that don’t make sense that reveal who you are inside.
The anomalies make you who you are.
That realization will not make you feel any better about them. Time may help you turn a blind eye, but guilt is the stain that never goes away.
In the last twenty-four hours I’d become aware that part of my mind—one I hadn’t used very often since the afternoon I’d walked all the way to the beach from Hollywood and decided I was done with being a screenwriter—was working at the story of what had happened. Rewriting it. Seeking a way of bringing it to a different conclusion.
Eventually—just before I’d gone to bed the night before—I believed I’d gotten an alternative narrative straight in my head. A way of making it appear as though I alone had been responsible for what happened to Feather and Dylan and Gemma, without having to mention what we’d found in Kincaid Cavern.
I would write it down, email it to Ken, and tell him to stick to the script and make sure the others did the same.
Because it was true. If I hadn’t dragged us all out on that expedition, three people would still be alive. And the four people still living wouldn’t have to get up every morning with those deaths in their minds, wondering when payment would come due—either from God, or someone much closer to home.
Perhaps there are people within whose lives that guilt can be accommodated.
Mine isn’t one of them.
At the far end of the promenade, where it runs out and turns to beach, I stopped for a cigarette, sitting on the low wall facing the sea. It was still early and there was nobody else in sight. I smoked, gazing vaguely down at the sand.
After a few minutes something dropped onto the ground in front of me. For a moment I couldn’t work out what it was.
I picked it up.
A necklace. With an ankh on it. Something I’d last seen hanging around Feather’s neck, when Molly and I laid out her body in the entrance to the cavern.
A man sat down near me on the wall. I didn’t turn to look, but I could tell he was very tall. He didn’t say anything.
“So now what?” I asked after a while.
“There will be no repercussions.” The man’s voice was deep but modulated. “From us, anyway.”
“Why?”
“What would it gain? Damage done to the site has more than likely rendered it nonfunctional. Congratulations, Mr. Moore. You managed to break the most important thing ever found.”
“But Ken only smashed the console in the smaller pool.”
“The larger pool creates those that come before—the ones that clear the Earth in preparation for a new beginning. To unleash them without the others would be planetary suicide. All evidenc
e of what occurred has been removed. We have sealed the cavern.”
“Kinkaid tried that.”
“It has been done far more thoroughly this time.”
“But there are others, right?”
“Yes. We discovered a room at the site. It seemed like it might have been a map. It was dark, lifeless. Did you see it?”
“We may have.”
“Were any markers lit on it? Indication of where other sites might be?”
“No,” I said. “It was just dead rock.”
“I don’t believe you.”
I turned my head to look at him. I saw a man, and yes, he was unusually tall—but not so much that people would stand and point. His face was big and bony, but again, within normal parameters. You’d have to have witnessed the creature I saw, the one who nearly killed me in the final run out of the cavern, to glimpse the genetic ghost of something not human in it. To anybody else, he’d just look like a basketball player.
“Okay,” I said. “Does that change the situation?”
“Not for now. I’ll put this in a way you’ll understand. It’s always cheaper to not make the movie. And it’s generally better to not kill people. Unless they talk.”
“Who’d believe us?”
“Nobody. But we’ve spent a very long time keeping this quiet. Our mission and purpose is not only to find, but to then keep it hidden afterward. Now is not the time for renewal, and it must never be within one man or woman’s power to take matters into their own hands. This needs to be secret. Keep it that way.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
“Be careful, Mr. Moore. Turn your attention from this, forever. And make sure we never have to meet again.”
He got up and walked away.
I sat a little longer, looking out at the ocean. After a while I realized that although there had been moral heft to the decision I’d come to about the deaths we had been involved in, a portion of what I’d felt had been provoked simply by fear. I’m not proud of that, but neither will I deny it.
The Anomaly Page 29