The Anomaly

by Michael Rutger

  “Bollocks. This time of day you normally look like you’ve been exhumed. By an amateur. But this morning it’s like you think you’ve discovered a reason to keep on living. Which is an illusion, incidentally. Heed the tiny demons and their wheedling voices. End it all.”

  “Ken, I’m not killing myself so you can claim the insurance. We’ve discussed this.”

  “Never been a team player, have you, mate.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Seriously, Nolan. Spill it.”

  I’d been intending to keep it quiet but he clearly wasn’t going to let it go. “Got an email.”

  “From?”

  “The publisher.”

  Ken raised an eyebrow. “‘The’?”

  “My.”

  He grinned like a kid and cuffed me on the shoulder, hard enough to spill half the coffee out of my cup. “Fucking fantastic, mate. Top news.”

  It actually kind of was. The two books I’d produced in the last year—accounts of Anomaly Files investigations, featuring stills from the show along with archive photographs—had been self-published, cobbled together by yours truly and thus looking like they’d been assembled by a reasonably talented sixth-grader. The email that had arrived before I came downstairs confirmed both were being acquired by a real-life publishing house and would be coming (fairly) soon to a bookstore near you.

  “They paying much?”

  “Almost nothing. But that’s—”

  “—not the point. I know, mate. Congrats. Great boost for the show, too. Blimey. So I guess we’d better try to find this bloody cavern, then, eh?”

  “Can’t do any harm.”

  We clinked paper cups and stood in companionable silence, sipping very average coffee and watching the sky start to bloom as we waited for the others to arrive.

  Molly had somehow organized a humongous thermos of much better coffee to warm up the cold, sleepy faces inside the SUV—and there’s a good atmosphere at the beginning of one of these things, when it all seems possible and exciting, the tiredness and bad temper haven’t yet set in, and you haven’t started to really quite hate each other. Ken spared us the prog rock and there was joking and laughter along the highway, early-morning sun slanting through the windows. Feather proved good at going with the flow. Gemma seemed distant, though as her hair was still shower-wet it’s possible she wasn’t awake enough yet to participate. Or else this was her Observing Journalist face.

  Eventually we turned off the main road and went rattling along a dusty track between twisted trees, following instructions from Molly and her trusty GPS unit. We were going to need it. Partly to navigate the very precise requirements of the planned route—which, though I’d admittedly borrowed freely from online sources, genuinely did involve original thinking from me—but also because when we were down in the canyon itself, the phone signal would be weak at best, nonexistent most of the time. And no data coverage at all, thankfully, which meant Ken couldn’t make me do one of the excruciating “live” updates that I was confident were watched by three people and a cat.

  Half an hour of desert later, the road abruptly came to an end and Ken parked in a cleared area that evidently passed as a lot. Pierre jumped out of the SUV first, camera on shoulder. Molly followed with the boom mike. I shoved my hands through my hair, waited until Molly nodded, and opened my door.

  I stepped down and took a slow look around, then started walking across the scrubby plain in the direction of the canyon, doing my best to appear thoughtful and committed, picking my intrepid way through gnarled clumps of low juniper, pinyon, and cottonwood trees. Pierre and Molly kept tracking while I got closer to the canyon—Ken holding Feather and Gemma back out of shot.

  When the canyon revealed itself properly I found myself slowing down, losing awareness of my job in front of the camera, genuinely taken aback by what I was seeing.

  It doesn’t matter how many times you’re told that nothing will prepare you for your first look at the Grand Canyon; the fact is nothing will prepare you for your first look at the Grand Canyon. It takes all the superlatives you’ve encountered before—words like “vast,” “inconceivable,” and “mind-blowing,” and drains all the color from them.

  It seems to stretch forever. The riot of reds and oranges and ochres in the rock walls is almost beyond credibility. The drop to the river defies comprehension, too, like an optical illusion, or something discovered on a distant planet where they built everything on a more expansive scale, under the direction of gods with a bigger budget.

  I reached for an appropriate response, something stirring enough to capture the emotional resonance of the moment. I walked to the edge, stared out across the landscape, and—after a long, pregnant pause—said:

  “Huh.”

  “Christ,” Ken muttered. He waved to Pierre to stop filming. “Moll, let’s feed Nolan a lot more coffee and a cigarette…and then we’ll try that again, shall we?”

  The second take was fine. Centered by doses of my two key food groups, I stood in silence for a moment and then started to talk, gazing out at the astonishing landscape beyond.

  “They say nothing prepares you for your first glimpse of the Grand Canyon,” I said with a wry smile. “And it’s true. Mankind may build towers to the sky and circuits too small for the naked eye, but only Mother Nature has the ability to truly take your breath away. I’ll give you a moment to let her do that.”

  I stepped to the side. Pierre had the sense to stay on the view for a few seconds and then pan slowly to my new position, by which time I was facing him in to-camera presenter mode.

  “I’m sure you’ll agree it’s not surprising so many stories have grown up around this extraordinary place,” I went on. “When mankind is faced with something wondrous, we have a tendency to reach for the stars—for the gods. As we embark upon our expedition, it’s important to guard against that. We have plenty of secrets of our own, and we’re going to look for one of them now. Come along with us…and let’s see what we find.”

  I left a beat, then turned and walked along the rim of the canyon with the blithe and confident air of someone who had the faintest idea of where he was going.

  “It’ll do,” Ken said. “Log it, Pierre. And now let’s go look at this trail.”

  Having been born and bred in California I could hardly have avoided hiking. But though I am a native there and to the manner grudgingly reconciled, I’ve always favored hiking in the sense of a “nontaxing wander through some pretty woods.” It was quickly obvious that getting down to the river from the rim of the canyon would involve hiking of a wholly different stripe.

  I’d told Molly where I thought we needed to get to, down at the river thousands of feet below, and she’d sorted out the rest—establishing that there were a couple of little-used descent trails from this area. The one we were intending to use was technically on the Navajo reservation, and so we kinda weren’t supposed to be here without permission.

  “Seriously?”

  A narrow and uneven trail clung to the edge of the crumbly, rocky cliff face, winding back and forth through striated fissures in the rock—looking down into a vast open space into which a sizable town could be dropped without touching the sides.

  Ken whistled. “Now would be a bad time to reveal you get vertigo, mate.”

  “I’m more worried about Pierre having to do it with the camera.”

  Pierre jumped off the rim and landed neatly six feet down the “path.” He trotted along it, then back, casting an annoyingly professional eye at the route farther down. “It’s fine,” he said. “I go trail-running on worse than this.”

  “Of course you do,” I muttered.

  Ken smirked. “Okay, camera boy, get yourself in position twenty yards down and we’ll do a walk-to-you. Molly, mike Nolan up. Nolan, walk toward us and say something very interesting. And try not to fall off.”

  “What should I do?” Feather asked.

  “To be honest, love, what I mainly need from you and Gemma right now is to
stay out of my way. So hold the fort up here until someone shouts up that we’ve got the shot done. If any Red Indian braves show up, tell them we’re with the government.”

  “Really?”

  “No,” he said. “Obviously don’t do that. Just…look, just stand there, okay? Both of you. And keep quiet.”

  Pierre and Ken headed down the trail. I waited until they were in position, while Molly threaded the lapel mike into my billowy off-white shirt and dropped the transmitter in the back pocket of my jeans. Then she picked her way down the path toward Pierre and Ken, looking sure-footed and confident despite the awkward boom mike. I suspect her family hikes don’t all start at Starbucks and end in a bar.

  When they were all together, Ken raised his hand.

  I stepped down onto the start of the trail, gazing out across the eerie multicolored moonscape. Then I started walking, looking at the camera and trying not to think about the enormous drop only a couple of feet to my right.

  “A long time ago,” I said, “there was a soldier, geologist, and explorer by the name of John Wesley Powell. He led the first passage through the Grand Canyon by Europeans, and went on to direct the Smithsonian’s ethnology department. His influence on the study of America’s prehistory is far-reaching, admittedly not always in positive ways. But whatever his bias, he’s responsible for recording a few of the Native American legends about the canyon.”

  I indicated the gorge. “There’s a Hualapai legend which said all this was created after a great flood, when one of their heroes, Pack-i-tha-a-wi—and no, I’m not sure that’s how you pronounce it—stuck a great knife into the land, and moved it back and forth until the canyon was formed, allowing the waters to flow back out to the Sea of the Sunset.”

  By now I was within a few yards of Pierre and the others. Ken motioned at me to keep going, however, and Pierre continued to film, walking steadily backward.

  “Another legend claimed the canyon was created to solace the grief of a great chief, after his wife died. The god Ta-vwoats created a trail to a beautiful land—heaven, in effect—and the chief visited his wife there. Ta-vwoats made him promise never to tell of what he’d seen, in case people wearied of the tribulations of life and tried to get there early. The chief agreed, and Ta-vwoats caused water to flow over the trail, barring access to the other land forever. This is a sacred place. Powell said he’d been warned by local tribes not to enter the Grand Canyon, that it was disobedience to the gods and could bring down their wrath. It didn’t stop him. And it’s not going to stop us—though we’ll be visiting with due respect to the local tribes and their beliefs, of course.”

  I was pretty much done now, but Ken and the others kept moving away from me down the path.

  “So,” I said, with enough emphasis to communicate that if they didn’t stop backing away soon I was simply going to stop talking, “two different perspectives—and the advantage freethinking researchers have is that we listen. We also consider things like the fact that within the canyon are massive rock formations with names like the Tower of Set, the Tower of Ra, and the Isis Temple. The official story is the early explorers simply happened to like Egyptian-sounding names, which were fashionable at the time—and maybe that’s true. But let’s keep an open mind. And now I’m going to stop talking, and concentrate on getting down to the river in one piece.”

  “And…cut,” Ken said. “Bit esoteric for the clickbait crowd, but history dorks will love it. Good work, everyone. Except you, Nolan. You were shit.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. Okay, slackers, let’s head back to the car and gather up our crap. It’s time to boldly go.”

  Chapter

  5

  I was just saying,” Molly said to me, meaningfully, as we started the walk back to the SUV, “how useful it is to have Feather with us.”

  “Hell yes,” I said. And to be fair, Feather was quickly adapting to being asked to carry things and/or stay out of the way, doing both with unflappable good cheer. “You’re part of the team already.”

  She grinned like a schoolgirl. “Ooh, ooh,” she said, handing her phone to Molly. “Before we get out of signal. Can I get a picture with Nolan?”

  We posed while Molly took a shot. I tried, as usual, not to look like a craggy middle-aged man who exercises but not quite enough.

  Feather grabbed the camera back and fired the picture off in an email. “To my husband,” she explained. “He’s a huge fan, too.” She flicked through her photos and held the phone out so Molly and I could see. A shot of a hipster-looking guy, standing grinning at the camera with a small boy.

  “Cute,” Molly said dutifully. “What’s his name?”

  “Perry. He’s five.”

  I took a look, too. “So…how old’s the kid, then?”

  It took her a moment, but then she laughed her head off. Molly caught my eye and winked.

  Good job, Nolan.

  As the team unpacked things from the SUV and distributed them for carrying down the trail, I walked a little way off to grab a cigarette. After a few minutes, Gemma wandered over to me. “So, Nolan. Is now good? For that little bit of background?”

  I smiled broadly. “Now is great.”

  “I must say, you’re a better actor than I realized.”

  “How so?”

  “Your reaction to seeing the canyon. You made it look like it was genuinely your first time.”

  “Well,” I said, “actually, this is my first time.”

  She stared at me. “What?”

  “I live in LA,” I said defensively. “So if I want a vacation, I tend to go farther away.”

  “You’re leading an expedition to look for this alleged cavern, for which no one’s ever found a shred of evidence, and you’ve never even been to the Grand Canyon before?”

  “I’ve never been to Egypt, either,” I said. “Does that invalidate my views on the pyramids?”

  “Well…maybe, yeah.”

  “Scientists say a bunch of things about Mars. None of them have ever been there.”

  She was looking at me in a curious, baffled way. “That’s…different. You can see that, right?”

  “Being too entrenched in the consensus can stop you from spotting what’s in front of your eyes,” I said, wondering if I might be better off heading back to the SUV to help. “Everybody agreed for years that the out-of-Africa diaspora of Homo sapiens happened sixty thousand years back, for example. But then in 2015, excavators at Daoxian in southern China found teeth in a cave floor, sealed below stalagmites that were uranium-dated to eighty thousand BC. Slam-dunk proof that the teeth have to be older—possibly as old as a hundred and twenty-five thousand years. Did you know that?”

  “I did not.”

  “And you don’t care. But my point is, sure, it got reported. Eventually. In journals nobody reads. But all the independent researchers who’d been ridiculed for years? It’s ‘Run along—the grown-ups have finally found evidence for what you’ve been saying. So now it’s real. But we’re controlling the story. Oh, and that other stuff you say? That’s still wrong.’”

  “But you didn’t know,” she said.

  I blinked. “What do you mean, ‘know’?”

  “On this and everything else. You were just making shit up, or repackaging other people’s made-up shit. You didn’t actually know this stuff.”

  “I’m hazy on your qualifications as an epistemologist.”

  “Is that to do with bugs?”

  “No. It’s the branch of philosophy that concerns the nature and scope of knowledge. Kant burned his entire life on it. Shoulda waited to talk to you, evidently.”

  “Throwing in a long word every now and then doesn’t make you smart.”

  I was trying to keep my tone light but finding it a struggle. “Neither does a lot of short ones. And a next page button. And Google ads for diet pills.”

  “Cheap shot. And may I also point out that it wasn’t you who found these teeth? This is all secondhand information—lik
e every single thing I’ve heard you say.”

  “Discoveries like that don’t come along often.”

  “Right. Hence your mantra that ‘it matters not whether we find, only that we continue to seek.’ Very zen. And super convenient, too. Because you’ve made kind of a specialty of not finding shit, right?”

  “Were shit easy to find,” I said, “shit would already have been found. It would be part of the consensus, instead of buried and denied.”

  “Neat sidestep. But seriously. I think my favorite was that episode where you marched up to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, and demanded to see all the skeletons of giants hidden in the vaults. That was priceless. You in pouring rain, in the street, demanding they stop covering up the secret history of America. And that poor guy from the museum repeating again and again that the skeletons didn’t exist.”

  “There are,” I said, “many reports from the 1800s mentioning huge skeletons. Even the 1891 Report of the Smithsonian’s own Bureau of Ethnology—at that time directed by John Wesley Powell himself, as conventional a scientist as you’ll find—details skeletons over seven feet tall found in Dunleith, Illinois, and Roane County, Tennessee. I’ve got a PDF of the original right here on my phone if you want to look. There are a ton of similar stories, in some cases found in deposit levels suggesting they predated the Native Americans.”

  “Wow. You’re prepared to go there? That way lies ‘the tribes weren’t the first people in North America, so they should stop whining about their land rights.’ You really want a piece of that? You’re braver than I thought.”

  “Of course not. Some of the reports could have been concocted by settlers who were trying to undermine Indian claims to be the most significant inhabitants. Which a number of Native American myths also do, by the way—consistently mentioning red-haired, fair-skinned ‘culture bearers’ in prehistory. Though naturally,” I added quickly, “it’s hard to tell how reliable our records of their oral histories are.”