The Anomaly

by Michael Rutger

  “I guess.”

  “Come on. This would take it to another level, right? It would prove this cave was known to Native Americans at some point, and they decorated it. Archeologists will want to come look, at least. Worst case, they’ll name the damned thing after you, and that’s actually kind of cool.”

  “Okay, okay,” I said. “I’ll go take a look.”

  “No,” she said. “We will.”

  We got out flashlights and walked to the back of the antechamber.

  “You really don’t have to do this.”

  “Yes, I do,” she said. “I had some issues back in the day. Anxiety. Panic attacks. Bulimia for a while.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That must have been…well, pretty shitty, I would imagine.”

  “It was. But it was a while ago and I did a lot of work on it and I’m fully functioning now.”

  “Huh. You think you know someone, eh? Next thing you’ll be telling me you’re a Republican.”

  “I am.”

  “What?”

  “But the point of my oversharing moment is that this ‘I’m not going down the passage’ crap cannot stand. So let’s get to it. Lead on.”

  “Seriously, you vote Republican?”

  “My dad’s a GOP congressman.”

  “Okay then.”

  We switched on the lights and walked in. With all the others still back in the main cave area, getting ready to climb back down to the river, the crevice seemed different. Extremely still and immensely quiet. Very, very ancient—of course, as it was hundreds of thousands of years old, if not more—and fundamentally inhuman. Molly’s breathing was very regular in the semidarkness, as though she was doing something in particular with it.

  “Yoga?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Cool. Is it helping?”

  “Actually, it’s making me light-headed. I’m going to stop it now.”

  I kept a close eye on the walls as we walked farther into the fissure, hoping I’d spot something that had been missed earlier. But there was nothing. Just yard after yard of irregular, natural, uninteresting rock.

  We trained our flashlights up toward the ceiling now and then, such as it was; a sharply tapering area, plagued with shadows. There was nothing to see there, either.

  Then we were at the end. “Ha,” Molly said, voice a little shaky. “In your face, dark and claustrophobic tunnel. I win.”

  “It doesn’t look the way it did on the phone,” I said, pointing my light straight up at the ceiling.

  “There’s a lip,” she said, peering up. “About ten, twelve feet up. Take a couple steps back.”

  We did, and I saw she was right. From this angle the beams showed a small recess beyond. “And there are your little outcrops,” I said. “One, two, three.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, sure, they look even in distribution. Possibly. But…Okay, hold the light.”

  I put a headlamp on and looked around before selecting a couple of especially ragged sections of side wall. I set my right foot on one, and used the other to pull myself up.

  From this elevated position I was able to angle myself so that my back was against the end wall, and then start to inch my way up, shifting feet and hands as required.

  “Wow,” she said. “It’s Spider-Man!”

  “Do fuck off, Moll.”

  It took five minutes of puffing and exertion to grab and yank myself up the twelve or fifteen feet until I could get a hand over the lip. I was stymied for a couple of minutes when it appeared that I was stuck, unable to get the rest of my body up, but I finally found a way to haul myself over.

  “It’s about six feet deep,” I told Molly below. “Kind of narrow, less than four feet.”

  “What about the outcrops? Do they look like they’ve been chiseled into shape?”

  There was enough illumination from my headlamp to show straightaway that both the frozen image on the camera and our view from below had been misleading.

  “They’re not outcrops,” I said. “They’re recesses.”

  “Like where a stone has fallen out of softer rock?”

  I moved up closer. “No,” I said. “Not unless the stones were all the same size. And…rectangular.”

  I slowly tilted my head back, redirecting the beam of the headlamp and revealing that this deeper part of the recess didn’t have a ceiling, but was open above my head.

  “And there’s more. Perfectly regular. Left, right, left, right. Stretching up as far as I can see. Holy crap, Moll.”

  “What?”

  I looked down at her. “This is a ladder.”

  Part Two

  The highest goal that man can achieve is amazement.

  —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  And the Lord regretted that

  he had made man on the earth,

  and it grieved him to his heart.

  —Genesis 6:6

  From the files of Nolan Moore:

  ENGRAVING OF JOHN WESLEY POWELL’S 1869 EXPEDITION (1875)

  Chapter

  16

  Ken was trying to sound nonchalant but not carrying it off. “How far up did you go?”

  “About twenty feet,” I said. “The steps kept going as far as I could see.”

  “So what’s your thinking?”

  “Maybe Kincaid wasn’t dicking around with the height thing after all, or could be this opening isn’t the one he was talking about. It’s a lower one, a second way to access a structure way up above. Maybe even the cavern he described.”

  “So we’ve got to go look, right?”

  “You mentioned something about needing a burger.”

  “Don’t be a twat, Nolan. I’ll have two tomorrow.”

  “It’s just a few steps at this stage, though, right?” This was Gemma.

  Feather stared at her. “Is that not enough, sweetie?”

  “Food will become an issue,” Molly said. “If we end up staying in the canyon for another night.”

  “Half rations,” Ken said breezily. “Only eat half our lunch, save the rest for tonight.”

  “And tomorrow morning?”

  “We sup on clean air and sunshine and call ourselves renewed in the eyes of a beneficent God.”

  “I get it,” I said. “You’ve got a secret stash of food, haven’t you. Hand it over.”

  “More like a thick winter coat to draw upon,” he said. “Plus I’ll have extra fries tomorrow. And onion rings. It all evens out.”

  “You play the long game, my friend. I admire that.”

  “It’s got me to where I am today.”

  “And yet you still do it?”

  “Or,” Dylan interrupted, from below in the boat: Molly had him on the short-range walkie-talkie, though the sound kept breaking up. “You check this thing out. I’ll take the dinghy downriver. There’s a spot a few miles down where there’s usually a little phone signal. I’ll call from there, get a mate to bring another cooler of food. Or worst case I fetch it myself, which just means you’ll have to hang around the cave until late afternoon.”

  “Sounds good,” Ken said. “But do not tell anybody. Not a word. Got that? This is ours.”

  We recorded a brief to-camera with me explaining what we’d found, and then gathered together.

  “Okay,” Ken said. “Nolan, you’re going up first, so Pierre can shoot you heading into the unknown. Also because you’re not fit enough to go at a stupid pace. The rest of you can go in whatever order you like, but I’m at the end again. So I can take a break every now and then without someone sticking their head up my arse.”

  “But wait,” Molly said. “Can you even get up to where the steps start, without someone…well, without assistance?”

  Ken opened his mouth, looked at the obstacle, and shut it again. “I’ll go last,” Molly offered. “I promise I won’t stick my head in your ass even once.”

  And so, individually, we scrambled up to the higher level and then, one by one, we started up
the shaft.

  I had a headlamp and once in a while looked up to check what was ahead. Gemma—right behind me—had a lanyard light that was left on the whole time, as everyone agreed that while we wanted to conserve batteries, it might get a little weird and claustrophobic climbing in the dark.

  Once you were in the shaft, full-body, it was impossible to deny it was man-made. It was about three and a half feet square. Even if it only went up fifty feet, that was many hundreds of cubic feet of rock chiseled out and carried through the fissure and, presumably, thrown into the river below.

  To me that was an inconceivable amount of effort unless something important was involved, though people in ancient times measured time and effort differently. Once they’d caught or picked dinner and made sure the youngsters weren’t being eaten by marauding pandas, there wasn’t a lot to do except sit around the fire passing deep ancestral wisdom back and forth. And, as I had tellingly observed in The Anomaly Files’ episode about Stonehenge (conducted via stock footage and diagrams and a terrible 3-D model some cocaine-addled friend of Ken’s had concocted), ideas of mobility were different, too. These days if you grow up in town A and are halfway motivated, the first task of postadolescence is getting the hell out to city B, or country C, even if you eventually wind up back near town A a couple of decades later because you’ve realized there is no Magical Other Place and you’re going to remain the same asshole wherever you go—so you might as well be somewhere it’s not a pain for the kids to see their grandparents once in a while.

  But back in BC? Families stayed in the same place for thousands of years, and so it doesn’t seem such a big deal to spend thirty of those years shuffling huge rocks around—because you do it on the unspoken assumption that every conceivable descendant will benefit from your efforts.

  Likewise, maybe, this shaft.

  After what felt like a pretty long time I paused and turned my head down toward Pierre in the middle of the pack.

  “How far have we come?” I was panting pretty hard.

  “There’s about two feet between each foot- or handhold,” he said, not remotely out of breath. “And I’ve done a hundred and fifteen. So call it two hundred and thirty feet.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Everybody down there okay?” There were murmurings and grunts of assent. “You okay, Ken?”

  “Fuck off.”

  I started up the ladder once more.

  When we checked later, we discovered it had taken forty minutes to climb. We had a couple more short breaks, when thighs and arms tightened or started twitching with fatigue, but otherwise we went up and up and up. I fell into a kind of trance, maintaining the repetitive process of reaching up, moving hands and feet, pushing up. I didn’t bother to speculate about what—if anything—we were going to find. The thing that has kept me from going crazy at certain periods in my life is the ability to let the future be. This has, naturally, meant there have also been times when life has dealt me a stunning blow to the jaw that I should have seen coming, laying me flat on my back while the gods of foresight laugh and point.

  But for the rest of the climb this faded away. Molly had me wrong in thinking I’d be pleased at the idea of this cave being named after me. Partly because if it was what we’d been looking for, Kincaid had prior claim. Mainly because I didn’t care. It’s never the world at large you want to prove yourself to. It’s someone in particular. Doesn’t matter how old you get, you’re still hoping for Mom or Dad to kiss you on the head.

  And yes, that person should ideally be yourself, just as the answers to all our questions and the objects of our quests should most likely be found within our own souls. But they’re not. We need more. Someone or something bigger than us. A magical other.

  And that’s why we reach for the gods.

  Or for someone to love.

  Eventually I looked up to check the next section of shaft and saw there was only another few feet before the handholds stopped, giving way to blackness.

  “Okay, people,” I said. “I think we’re here.”

  I pulled myself up the last few steps.

  Chapter

  17

  It was immediately clear that another passage lay at the top of the shaft. A real one, this time. My headlamp revealed ten feet of floor on either side. It was rocky and covered in dust—some of it dark, almost like soot—but basically level and flat.

  Before me, the passage disappeared into darkness. Turning, I saw it did the same back toward the wall of the canyon, running in the same direction as the fissure hundreds of feet below.

  I pulled myself out of the shaft. The walls here were also even. Not perfect, but without question worked and man-made. The passage was ten or twelve feet wide and about the same high—much closer to the dimensions Kincaid had claimed in the article.

  “Do we come up?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You should do that.”

  I walked a little farther down the passage as the rest of the team completed the ascent. The width remained constant. There were chisel marks on the walls. It was fairly cold, but clammy. The air felt dead. Most of it would have been here for a very long time.

  Gemma was out next. “Didn’t get a chance earlier,” she said. “Just wanted to say, you know, thanks.”

  “For what?”

  “Saving my life, you dick.”

  “It was an accident. I was busy saving mine. You received collateral salvation.”

  She shook her head. “You really do have a problem.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “No idea. I’m not a therapist. I don’t know if it’s fallout from your marriage imploding or what, but you seem determined to prove you’re an asshole.”

  “I can’t keep up with you. Last night you thought maybe I wasn’t, now we’re back to it being a done deal.”

  “I’m serious. Like when we first got up in the cave down there. If anybody else had found it they’d have been all ‘I’m the man.’ Legitimately, for once. But you get busy trying to pass the accolade on to Pierre.” She lowered her voice. “Who’s a nice guy and plenty hot but probably can’t find his way out of his own apartment without using Google Maps.”

  I shrugged. “I got us somewhere. Yes. It may still be there’s nothing here.”

  “True,” she said. “Well, perhaps you’re right. Maybe you are just an asshole after all.”

  “Fuck me,” Ken panted as he climbed laboriously out of the shaft. “So this would be an actual passage, then.”

  “Yep.”

  “So what’s the plan? I mean, after I’ve stopped feeling like my heart is going to explode.”

  “We go that way,” I said, pointing along the passage that led toward the wall of the canyon.

  “And there’s enough air and stuff here, right?”

  “I assume so. Presumably it’s open to the canyon at that end, and we just didn’t spot it because it’s too high, or hard to see amid the sediment staining. So I think we should walk that way, stake out the territory. Plus it’ll show if there’s any openings along the way.”

  “Not if,” Feather said. The others were standing in a group now, flicker-lit by the light around Gemma’s neck. “Where. This has to be Kincaid’s cavern, doesn’t it?”

  “You’ve gotta hope,” I said. “But wait and see. And let’s only have a couple of lamps burning. We’re going to need artificial light all the time. It’s a long way back for more batteries, and I’ve seen all those movies.”

  “Good thinking,” Gemma muttered as everyone but me and Ken turned off their lights. “Because also it’s totally not spooky or anything doing it this way.”

  “Pierre,” Ken said. “Start filming.”

  Pierre tucked in behind me as I started to walk.

  “After a long climb,” I said, “we’re here. Wherever ‘here’ is. It’s certainly man-made. The contrasts between this passage and the fissure below are obvious. This is much wider, there’s a more even floor, far greater consistency in the walls and ceiling. Someone pu
t a lot of effort into this. Why? I hope we’re about to find out.”

  We walked farther, seeing more of the same. I turned my head to the right so the light was stronger on the wall. “I’m still not seeing any markings, or anything else of interest, beyond some evidence of chiseling,” I said.

  Then I stopped. “Well, except…that.”

  We all looked in silence at the doorway in the wall.

  The opening was about four feet wide, sides perfectly straight, curving to a graceful arch at least ten feet from the floor.

  “There’s one on the other side, too,” Molly said.

  All heads—and Pierre’s camera—slowly swiveled to see. Yes, a matching opening on the opposite wall.

  “Nolan,” Ken said, “does this tally with Kincaid’s report?”

  “Yeah. Well, in that he said that fifty-seven feet from the outside wall there were openings on either side. With curved passages leading from both.” I moved the light from side to side and peered into the doorways. “Which does appear to be the case.”

  “You want to check if these are about that distance from the entrance?”

  “Let’s do that.”

  And so we walked farther along the passage, marking out the distance with our feet. “Shouldn’t we be able to see light from the opening to the outside by now?” Gemma asked after a minute.

  “Yes,” I said. “Well, maybe. Soon.”

  But after another twenty feet the light from my headlamp showed why we weren’t seeing anything. The passage didn’t end in an opening. It ended in a wall.

  “That makes no sense,” Molly said, with a trace of anxiety. “This passage is straight, isn’t it? We must be at the canyon wall by now.”

  I went right up to barrier and bent down to get a closer look, and finally put two and two together. “It’s been sealed,” I said. I ran my finger along a joint. “Chunks of rock, joined with some kind of rough mortar.”

  I turned to Ken. “That’s what the rocks were inside the opening below. Dylan said there’d been a tremor in this area last year, right? And it dislodged rocks into the river?”