The Anomaly

by Michael Rutger

  “Yes,” Gemma said. “Hence those rapids yesterday being more hectic than they used to be. He did say that.”

  “And it was enough to crack the bricking-up below, too. That’s why nobody has spotted the opening in the last hundred years: It wasn’t there. Last year the fill-in fell apart, leaving what we found. Up here it survived. Did anybody keep counting as we walked?”

  “Yeah,” Ken said. “We’re now about twenty yards from those doorways, so call it sixty feet. Or fifty-seven, near enough. I’m bored with being judicious and ‘maybe, maybe not,’ Nolan. This is Kincaid’s cavern. Face it.”

  “I think it must be. So the only question is…what do we do now?”

  “Meaning?”

  “There’s a strong argument that we should retire in triumph and hand it over to the grown-ups.”

  “Nolan, we are grown-ups.”

  “You know what I mean, Ken. Qualified, experienced, by-the-numbers and write-it-all-down archeologists. People who won’t inadvertently screw up the site.”

  “But Kincaid and the bloke from the Smithsonian already stomped all over it a hundred years ago.”

  “That just means there’s two layers of archeological evidence to protect. We’ve found the thing, and that’s awesome. So let’s not turn a small gain into a huge loss.”

  “Small gain?” Feather said. “Nolan—you found Kincaid’s cave! You’ve proved thousands of people wrong, including the Smithsonian itself. This could change…everything.”

  “So let’s protect the win. And I’m not only talking about The Anomaly Files, Feather. Your foundation doesn’t want to be associated with a monumental screw-up. It’s somewhat illegal to enter a cave in the Grand Canyon without permission. And when I say ‘somewhat’ I mean ‘totally,’ in a ‘this is an actual criminal offense’ sense. And that’s going to count tenfold for a cave nobody even knew was here. It’s not just the archeological establishment we’d have to worry about, or radical Native American groups. The science fanboys of the Internet will crucify us.”

  “So what are you actually worried about?” Gemma asked. “The integrity of the site, or losing your cable show?”

  Ken and I turned to her. “Both,” we said, together.

  Pierre stopped filming and lowered the camera. “So what are we going to do?”

  Everyone turned to Ken. Molly might be Acting Mom, but nobody’s in any doubt about who’s the daddy.

  Ken thought it over, but not for long.

  “Annoyingly,” he said, “the twat in the billowy shirt is correct. We have not often been forced to confront the problem of actually finding something. Or ever, really. So I’m thinking on my feet. But the bottom line is we’ve already done enough to make a few headlines. Let’s make sure they’re good ones. Having said which, I’m not leaving without taking a peek down one of those side passages. We’ve earned that, I reckon. And if we trample some old dust in the process, well, sue me. Okay, Nolan?”

  “Fine by me.”

  “All right, team. So let’s all get back there and we’ll film Nolan going in.” He looked at me, unable to suppress a grin. “Well done, mate. I told everyone you weren’t a total loser.”

  “Did they listen?”

  “No. But they might now.”

  He led the others back up the passage while I took another look at the sealed-up opening. Gemma lingered.

  “Congrats again,” she said. “Seriously. But you got one thing wrong.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You said the only question was what we did next.”

  “Well, it is.”

  “No. I’d like to know the answer to another one.”

  “Which is?”

  “Why Kincaid went to so much trouble to brick this place up.”

  Chapter

  18

  So what’s supposed to be down there?” Ken asked.

  We’d gathered around the doorway on the left side of the passage, backpacks piled against the other wall. Pierre experimented with Feather and Gemma to find the best way to hold their lights so he could hope to get usable film. It wasn’t going to be easy. The darkness had an inky quality, only reluctantly yielding to the glow of a flashlight, quickly reclaiming its territory as soon as the beam moved on.

  “Didn’t you read the original article?”

  “Yeah. Well, some of it. Come on, Nolan, neither of us thought we were going to find the thing. I may have skimmed the later sections. And earlier sections. Okay, all of it.”

  “He didn’t say much about these passages. Just that there are rooms along them.”

  “Ready,” Pierre said.

  “Okay,” I said, to camera. “I can assure you that we’re mindful of the respect due to this ancient site, and aware that the first thing that needs to happen is a thorough investigation by archeologists with the expertise to rigorously analyze what’s here, and place it within historical and anthropological contexts. But as regular viewers know, we’ve spent a long time seeking. Having finally found something, it’s hard not to allow ourselves a peek.”

  I started into the side passage. It was narrower than the main one, but still about eight feet wide. The floor was just as flat, and the walls even more clearly worked. As soon as I entered, it bent to the right, then carried on straight.

  After about ten feet I saw something in the wall. A recess, six inches deep. I ran my finger over the lower surface. Dust, again dark, like soot.

  “This looks like it was designed to hold a torch or lamp,” I said. “And whoever lived here, or spent time here, would have been in constant need of artificial illumination. It’s really, really dark. There’s no natural light. Never has been. And of course there’s the question of why someone would want to live this far under the ground. Because though we got here by climbing, that’s where we are. There’s some precedent for Native American tribes living in cliffs. The Anasazi inhabited an area known as the Four Corners, where Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona meet. Other tribes referred to them as the ‘ancient people,’ and they established cliff dwellings in places like Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and Mesa Verde, Colorado. But those were constructed into existing overhangs, in large, open cave mouths. They didn’t involve forging tunnels into solid rock. Why would you go to the unfathomable effort of building a passage like this, so deep in the earth?”

  After ten feet my flashlight revealed a doorway on the right-hand side. Six feet wide, again curved at the top.

  “So—is this another passage?” I stood in front of the opening. “It appears not.”

  I walked into the space, holding the light up in front of me. Pierre tucked in behind and shot over my shoulder, as close to my POV as he could. The others followed.

  It was a room, oval, about twenty feet long. The ceiling was a little lower than in the passage we’d entered from. The floor and walls had been worked to the same standard. Both sides had three of the niches we’d seen, all empty. At the far end, off-center, was what looked like a table or plinth. A portion of the wall hadn’t been carved back to meet the curve, but instead left as a level platform three feet wide, three feet off the ground, like a cube partially embedded in the wall.

  I walked around the room, holding the light up to the walls, and then down toward the floor. No markings, nothing on the ground except for more of the dark dust. Assuming the room had ever been used for something, no traces of activity remained. It felt dead.

  “The plot thickens,” I said to the camera. “Clearly this room had a purpose, but it’s impossible to tell what it might have been.”

  When I moved the light again I noticed something I hadn’t seen before, on the other side of the room. A portion where the floor hadn’t been leveled—where, in fact, a small and very regular four-sided pyramid shape remained, about two feet high. The sides were even. Its purpose was even harder to guess at. It was not level with the “table” on the side, nor positioned in obvious relation to it. You don’t realize how used you are to seeing symmetry in man-made structu
res until you’re confronted with blatant asymmetry, nor how much being a member of a culture enables you to immediately make informed guesses about something’s purpose.

  I said something to this effect to the camera. “And that makes you all the more prone to ask ‘What the heck was it for?’ If not decoration, it must have had a function. What was it? I don’t know. Maybe an archeologist will.”

  I wandered back through the room slowly, giving Pierre a chance to pick up some nonspeaking footage for intercuts, and then went back out into the corridor passage.

  “Well,” I said.

  Everyone remained silent, even Ken. This place did that to you. It was very heavy. Very quiet. In the outside world, real or virtual, there’s such a clamor that you feel you have to make a sound. To establish yourself as part of the crowd, make sure that you are added to the reckoning, to stick up your hand and claim the attention that proves you’re alive.

  In a silence this profound you felt different. Some deep, rusty, older part of your brain urged you to remain quiet, to avoid being noticed.

  “Let’s go on a little farther,” I said.

  We spent the next hour exploring the passage. There were more rooms on both sides. Most about the same size, others larger, including one perhaps three times as long, in more of a lozenge shape. There were a few smaller ones, too. All but two of the rooms we entered had an example of the wide, semicuboid ledges, and most also had a small pyramid. Their location was unpredictable, and it’s not as if they could have been shoved to different places and left there by accident: they’d been hewn out of solid rock. The one thing it did remind me of was the curious unfinished chamber found under the Pyramid of Cheops. Small, low-ceilinged, divided into different levels and sections, its purpose yet to be established.

  “So what’s the deal with those things?” Gemma asked me when we were in one of the larger rooms. We’d stopped filming a while back, and were exploring the passage in pairs.

  “No idea,” I said. “And I don’t understand the variation in placement, either. Native American art is generally pretty formalized. Like I said the other night: There’s a way of representing something, and that’s the way it’s done. So I’m assuming these probably aren’t art, but utility structures.”

  “For doing what?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  Ken popped his head into the room. “Nolan, come and have a look at this.”

  We followed him forty feet down the passage. “Dunno if it means anything,” he said. “But it’s different.”

  He led me into a room that was smaller, about ten feet across, and circular. Neither the ledge nor a pyramid structure was present, though there was a rectangular depression in the floor. I noticed the rock within it was darker than usual, and then I realized that the walls were, too.

  “Looks almost like that was a fire pit,” I said. “Though…”

  I raised the lamp and looked at the ceiling. No sign of a concentration of carbon material, as you might expect above a fire. And no hole. “Who’d light fires underground? The whole place would get choked with smoke in seconds.”

  “What about a whatsit?” Ken said. “One of those ceremonial things.”

  “A kiva,” I said. “Yeah, maybe.” Gemma was looking uncomprehending. “Some of the southwestern tribes had underground circular spaces called kivas. About this size, sometimes larger. You see them at Chaco and Mesa Verde, to which, yes, I have actually been. In real life.”

  “Ha ha. What are they for?”

  “Rituals, and for guys to sit around making laws and being sexist and stuff. Usually had a fire pit in the middle. Often built-in banquettes in the walls, too, which this doesn’t, but maybe it had wooden benches or something. Kivas have a hole in the ceiling, so in this one you’re still going to have a serious smoke problem, which might explain the dark dust, but…who knows.”

  Ken stood, hands on hips, looking around. “Well, it’s all very much of a something,” he said. “And I think we can assume we’re hell-yes going to get another season on the back of this. But right this moment there’s a more pressing concern we need to attend to.”

  “What?”

  “I’m hungry.”

  Chapter

  19

  We went back to the main passage and got out the sandwiches and water. We all stuck to Ken’s suggestion of eating only half, in case Dylan hadn’t managed to score additional food for tonight. Pierre wandered off down the opposite corridor with his sandwich and came back twenty minutes later.

  “Same down there,” he said. “Same rooms, similar sizes, same pyramid things. There was a doorway that seemed like it’d been blocked with a single sheet of stone. Couldn’t move it.”

  “How far’s the passage go?”

  He shrugged. We didn’t know how far the other one went, either. When we’d turned around to head back for lunch, after seeing about twenty rooms, the passage was still leading out into the darkness. “Didn’t Kincaid claim there were statues and urns and hieroglyphics and stuff?”

  “Yes. But not in this part.”

  “So where?”

  “Well, bear in mind he doesn’t even mention the shaft we came up from the fissure. But I think after about another hundred and fifty feet the main passage is supposed to open out into a large circular space. With a big statue in the middle. Then rooms full of gold urns and mummies and Lord knows what else.”

  “So we’re going to go have a look, right?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Pierre wandered off to sit next to Gemma.

  I’d been firm about not trampling the site earlier, but so far there’d been nothing to disturb. I knew that what we’d seen and filmed was enough. But it didn’t feel like enough. And that wasn’t an ego thing. What we’d found was weird and interesting and would have a bunch of academics scratching their heads and muttering “Huh.” Maybe even the father of the woman running reception back at the hotel would be forced to consider the idea that amateurs without tenure knew stuff. Or sometimes accidentally turned out to be right, as Gemma would doubtless have phrased it. We were guaranteed a spread in Ancient American magazine, and maybe a mention in Obscure Academic Quarterly About Indigenous Peoples (circulation: 151 copies worldwide, hidden in college libraries where no one under the age of forty goes except to make out).

  But that wasn’t getting it out there. That wasn’t jamming stuff in front of the eyes and into the minds of the people with a lock on the historical narrative, nor the millions content to regard what’s trending on Twitter as the burning issue de nos jours. And this wasn’t Chaco or Mesa Verde, somewhere tourists could come look, ferried in buses and wandering down nice, easy paths. It was some distance up a rock face in a minor and restricted back section of the Grand Canyon. Once the archeologists had done their thing, this place would be shut off and forgotten and nothing would have changed. That wasn’t enough. Not if there was more.

  I checked the time. Twenty after two. I turned to Ken, who was sitting a few feet along the wall, gazing up at the ceiling and smoking.

  “Ken,” I said.

  “I agree.”

  “With?”

  “What you’re about to say.”

  “We both argued to the contrary earlier.”

  “We need more than this, Nolan. Okay, not ‘need.’ Want. Deserve. What we’ve found is great. But if there’s slam-dunk evidence we can get on film by taking a five-minute walk past that shaft, we’d be mental not to get it in the bag. Unless we’ve got the money shot in our grubby little hands, we can’t hope to own the story. You know that as well as I do. I was just sitting here waiting for you to realize it.”

  “And if I hadn’t?”

  “I would have found a way of gently pointing it out.”

  “I see.”

  “So what’s supposed to be down there?”

  “A big round room. With a bunch of passages leading off, like the spokes of a wheel. That’s where Kincaid claimed they saw the reall
y zany stuff—golden urns, mummies.”

  “And there’s a statue in the main room?”

  “So he claimed. Massive, lots of arms.”

  “You don’t believe it, do you.”

  “No. That whole section always read to me like he just started making shit up. It could be that he had the same experience we’ve had. He’d found something amazing. Something that should have been enough. But he knew it wouldn’t get the man on the street to raise his head from the trough. Kincaid was a guy who’d spent his whole life in the wilderness, back when America was genuinely wild. He wanted the folks back east to understand what an extraordinary country it is, how deep and unexpected its history might be. So he embellished. A lot.”

  “So there’s a chance there’s nothing down there?”

  “Such is the disappointing fate that oftentimes befalls impartial questers after truth.”

  “Don’t I know it. All right—let’s have a look. Then we’ll piss off. There’s a cold bottle of Tovaritch on that boat with our names on it. And for once, you’ve earned it.”

  Ten minutes later we set off, heading back up the main passage. We walked carefully around the hole down into the shaft, and then we were into new territory.

  After another hundred feet or so the design of the passage abruptly changed. The walls—previously straight—became concave on both sides, more like a tunnel. The passage widened by a couple of feet. There was also a slight upward slope. The overall effect was far more finished and noticeably grander. It seemed clear that we were heading in the right direction, getting closer to the heart of a ceremonial structure.

  Though Pierre filmed me heading onward, I didn’t say much. I pointed out the change in the design of the passage, and speculated that the slope might be part of a form of emotional architecture, signifying upward spiritual progress. I wasn’t sure if this made sense within local culture and frankly it could have been they simply messed up keeping it level, but saying this kind of thing is what I get (minimally) paid for.