The Anomaly

by Michael Rutger

  Otherwise I kept quiet, until suddenly something changed. The air became noticeably cooler, and the walls on either side disappeared.

  “Okay,” I said. “Everybody—lights on.”

  One by one, the people behind me turned on their headlamps. There was a long moment of silence.

  “Holy crap,” Gemma whispered.

  Chapter

  20

  Slowly we spread out into the space.

  The room was very large. Far bigger than anything we’d seen before, well over a hundred feet across. It was hard to be sure of the full extent because light struggled to penetrate the darkness, but as people walked out into the room the glow of their lamps seemed to reveal a perfect circle, rising up toward a dome.

  In the middle, directly in line with the main passage we’d come up, was a cube of stone, three feet to a side. This had been carved out of something other than the bedrock surrounding us. It looked harder and much more finely worked than anything we’d encountered before. It had already struck me that the small structures we kept seeing in the rooms down the side corridors—the embedded table/ledges and the randomly placed four-sided pyramids—seemed notably geometric. This took that stylization to a whole other level, and would have been remarkable even were it not for the thing sitting on top of it. It wasn’t a statue, a Buddha-like god rendering of the type Kincaid had described.

  It was a sphere. Carved out of stone, utterly perfect. And about—I estimated by comparing it to Pierre, who was approaching it as he filmed—twelve feet across.

  “What the actual fuck?” Ken said, staring up at the sphere as we walked around it.

  “I know.”

  “You seen anything like that before?”

  “No. A bunch of granite balls were discovered in Costa Rica back in the 1930s. Maybe some in Bosnia a few years ago, too, though the word is those are likely concretion artifacts, natural phenomena. The Costa Rica ones seem genuine, but the biggest is under six feet high. And I don’t think any of them are this perfect.”

  “So there’s nothing like this?”

  “Nowhere in the world, ever. Certainly not buried over a mile underground. Propped on an equally perfect cube.”

  “So this would be the money shot?”

  “This is the shot of our lives, Ken.”

  Molly called over from near the wall. “There’s markings here. And a doorway.”

  We went over. There were indeed markings on the wall, chipped into the rock, made visible by sooty deposits. It was impossible to tell what they were supposed to represent. The doorway was six feet wide and maybe twice that tall. Beyond, utter darkness.

  “Why’d they make the passages so high?” Ken said.

  “No idea.”

  “There’s more doorways over here,” Feather called. She and Gemma were exploring around the bottom of the room, close to the main entrance.

  “Spokes of a wheel,” Molly said. “Isn’t that how Kincaid described it?”

  “He did.”

  “Good,” she said briskly. “So we’ve found his cave. And we’ve found that thing in the middle, too. Which is truly awesome. We rock. If you’ll excuse the pun. And so now, I’m hoping, we’re going to leave?”

  Her voice sounded the way it had when it’d been just her and me in the lower passageway. Tight, overmodulated. I didn’t think it was merely claustrophobia, though, or whatever it had been about earlier. We were tired, after a few nights of patchy sleep and a lot of exertion—but it wasn’t that, either. However much you know that an archeological site is no big deal, its inexplicability a function of cultural ignorance, it has a strange atmosphere. A sense of passing and loss and things gone by. When you are far separated in time from its creators, and divorced, too, from their lives and motivations, they feel stripped of humanity—especially when total lack of ambient light means that you’re effectively there in the middle of the night.

  “Yeah,” Ken said, and even he didn’t sound his usual self. “We need twenty seconds of Nolan talking in front of that big stone ball, and then we’re out of here. Nolan, make it good. Or just stand there and point. It kind of speaks for itself, mate.”

  I walked with him over to the sphere, and Pierre told Ken how to hold his lamp to back up the light attached to the camera. I was aware of the others wandering around the periphery of the room, but any flickers of light from them would only add to the atmosphere. They’d all know to keep quiet.

  “So,” I said, to camera. Something was supposed to come after that, but I wasn’t sure what. I started again. “As you can see, we’ve found something else. Something that makes the rooms earlier seem…less of a big deal.”

  I gestured up at the sphere. Pierre slowly tilted back to take it in, then followed me as I started walking around it.

  “I don’t know what type of rock this is, but it’s different from what the passages are carved out of. Different from the canyon as a whole. This looks more like granite. Something hard enough to be precisely worked and shaped. And then, somehow, they got it here.”

  I stepped back a few paces. “And to make matters stranger, it’s balanced on top of a cube. Well, not ‘balanced’—you’ll see it fits neatly into a shallow depression which has been carved to hold it in position. I don’t even know how you’d start doing something like that.”

  I turned from the ball and spoke straight to camera. “I’ll be honest with you, viewers. I don’t know what to say about any of this. I’ve never heard of anything like it, anywhere in the world. Kincaid said they found a big statue here. Why did he lie? I have no idea. Or, maybe, one idea. In his day people were still discovering extraordinary things about this country—the Native American mound complexes, natural features like the Devils Tower in Wyoming, vistas like Bryce Canyon. Maybe Kincaid didn’t think a stone ball would be big enough news.

  “But he was wrong. That other stuff? It’s amazing, but we now know what it is, and why it’s there. The object behind me is something that conventional history has no way of explaining. This, my friends, is an honest-to-God anomaly. And you’ve been with us every step of the way. This is yours. So now we’re going to beat a graceful retreat, and hand this mystery over to the experts. Thanks for coming with us on this remarkable journey.”

  I winked, to show I was done, and stepped back from the sphere. Pierre lowered the camera.

  “Good enough,” Ken said. “So now let’s—”

  “Hey, guys.” This was Gemma, calling from the darkness on the far side of the room. “Before we go, you should come see this. There’s a—”

  The grinding noise was not loud.

  It came from under the floor, but was such a deep tone that it was hard to tell from which direction. It was a gentle sound, and wouldn’t have been at all unnerving except for the fact that the room was so quiet.

  Then, suddenly, the cube disappeared, dropping through a neat square hole that had appeared beneath it. It didn’t plummet, but descended at a measured rate, until the top was flush with the floor.

  This was so very surprising that there was a one-second delay before I processed the inevitable consequence.

  The stone ball descended, too, landing on the ground with a crash.

  Then the ball started to roll.

  “Everyone—get out of the way!”

  Pierre threw himself to the side. Ken and I backed hurriedly away. I knew Gemma was out of range on the far side and Molly’s squawk confirmed she was well clear, too.

  But then I saw Feather.

  She was down near the entrance from the main passage, frozen in place, eyes wide, staring at the ball as it came toward her, unable to comprehend what was happening.

  “Feather!” I shouted. “Move!”

  The ball was gathering speed, rolling down the indentation of the path, and still she appeared rooted to the spot. I started to run, but I was on the wrong side to get around to her and I knew all I could do was keep shouting in the hope that I’d break through to her.

  Finally her
eyes snapped back to awareness.

  She moved. But she darted the wrong way.

  Instead of getting out of the path of the ball, she seemed to get confused, or…I don’t know what went through her head, and unless you’ve stood in the path of a massive stone ball rolling toward you like a movie come horribly to life, you don’t realize how the mind and body can part company, explode in an instant into a level of fear where it’s impossible to make rational choices, or any decision at all.

  Ken and I shouted at her, and she realized what she’d done. But by then the ball was nearly upon her and so she started backing away from it instead—and then turned and ran down the passage, the only way she could go.

  The ball rolled right into it.

  Ken and I ran after but by now the ball was going so fast we couldn’t keep up. We were shouting and screaming at Feather but I can’t tell you what we were trying to say.

  There was a crunching impact that nearly knocked us off our feet. At first I couldn’t work out why the ball had stopped but then I remembered the passage had gotten wider as we’d walked up it, about the point where the slope had kicked in—a slope I now realized was not an error, or architectural conceit, but there to cause the ball to roll.

  The impact reverberated through the earth like a tremor, and then everything was quiet.

  Chapter

  21

  Two seconds later, a cacophony of people yelling and screaming and running. Only Ken and I had been in a position to clearly see what had happened—the others blindsided by the ball, or too far back in shadow. Everyone was screaming at everybody else, all at the same time, trying to check if people were okay, and gradually—once they realized her voice wasn’t among those echoing in the tunnel—specifically shouting for Feather.

  Ken was the first to rein the chaos back into actual words. “What the fuck?” he bellowed. “What the fuck?”

  I had nothing. I was standing blinking at the stone ball. It was extremely hard to process what had occurred, not least because it seemed ridiculous, too absurdly Indiana Jones to have happened in front of our eyes. My mind kept ricocheting between a conviction that it had only been a seen-it-all-before special effect—and a horrified awareness that no, it had just actually happened in real life.

  I finally got stuck between the two in a state of momentary calm, or indecision about how exactly to freak out. I turned from the ball and in the flickering and swirling of flashlights was able to run a quick internal roster and establish that everyone else was here, in the passage, and they all seemed okay. Physically, at least.

  I shouted for quiet. It took ten seconds to get through to everyone. Then there was silence.

  I held up my hand to keep it that way. And after a few seconds, we heard something.

  “Nolan? Ken?” It was Feather’s voice.

  “Feather—are you okay?”

  “Yes, I’m okay,” she said. Her voice sounded shaky but clear, and surprisingly close. Though the stone ball fit snugly in the passage it had rolled down—the concave walls making terrible sense now, too—the point where the tunnel narrowed had square corners, meaning the ball didn’t plug it like a cork in a bottle. “Are you all okay?”

  “We’re fine,” I said. “Well, unharmed. Are you okay?” I was dimly aware I’d asked this before. Once didn’t seem enough.

  “I fell down,” she said. “I scraped my leg. And face, I think. But…basically I’m okay.”

  “Have you got a light with you?”

  “Yes—a headlamp. Though it’s a bit weak.”

  “What can you see from there?”

  “There’s gaps around the ball,” she said. “But…they’re really small. What…Nolan, what are we going to do?”

  “There’s only one thing I can think of,” I said. “There may be some other way out of here, but…it could take a while to find it. I’m going to have to ask you to go back down the shaft. Get down to the river. Hopefully Dylan will be back by now. Tell him what happened. And go get help.”

  I turned to Molly and Ken. “Unless one of you has a better idea?”

  “No,” Ken said. “There is no other idea. But Feather—be very careful. Do not rush down that shaft, or down the canyon wall once you get outside. Look after yourself. Be safe. We’re not going anywhere.”

  And it was only when Ken said these words that we started to truly understand the position we were in.

  Fifteen minutes later we were all in the middle of the big central room. We’d spoken with Feather a little longer, making sure she was as calm as could be hoped for, and telling her again and again to take it easy on the two descents. Then she left. I couldn’t help thinking that in an ideal world it would have been Pierre setting off to do this, as he’d be able to do it twice as fast, and more safely—but it was already evident that we weren’t living in an ideal world.

  Molly and Pierre were taking inventory of what we had with us—food, water, camera batteries—getting the key stuff out of the backpacks and putting it in piles so we knew what we were dealing with.

  Meanwhile I took Gemma to one side. “What happened?”

  “I’m so…” She was fighting back tears.

  “Gemma, it’s okay. I’m not giving you a hard time. Nobody’s going to do that. It could have happened to any of us. I’m amazed it wasn’t me. I’m the team klutz. We just need to know what made it happen so we can avoid doing it again.”

  She looked at me gratefully. “There was a…Come. I’ll show you.”

  Ken saw where we were going and joined us. Gemma led me to an area of wall close to one of the passages leading into darkness. There was a rectangular patch of floor, about a foot wide by two feet long, that looked different from the rest. It was now half an inch below the rest of the ground.

  “I was actually trying to tell you about this,” Gemma said, indicating a portion of the wall next to the passage. Something had been carved into it. The letters D O, and what might have been an N, or part of an M.

  Ken grunted. “Classy. One of the previous guys chipped his name into the site.”

  “Right. It distracted me, and that’s how I ended up…”

  She stopped talking. I patted her on the back, feeling awkward. “It is what it is. What happened to your arm?”

  She glanced down at the smear of blood along her right forearm, thick enough that it was dripping onto the ground. “Oh, nothing. It’s the cut from when we nearly fell down the wall earlier. I must have knocked it.”

  “Okay,” Ken said. “Either a couple of us need to grid-walk this room, checking there’s nothing else like it, or else we all go sit in the middle and stay very still.”

  “That’s assuming there’s anything else in here to trigger,” I said. “There may not be. That ball did the job pretty effectively already, don’t you think?”

  “But what job? Stopping whoever gets in here from leaving again? Why?”

  “I have no clue,” I said. “And…we don’t actually know there’s no other way out.”

  “We haven’t proved it, no. But why block that passage if there is?”

  “Gemma, do me a favor—go tell Pierre and Molly to turn off their phones. You too. As in complete power-down.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s no signal in here, so they’re pointless. Except that if all the other batteries run out, we can use them as flashlights. So let’s start saving power.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Good thinking.”

  Ken watched her go. “That’s smart, but you just freaked her out a little, Nolan. Nobody wants to think about sitting around in this place with no light.”

  “I know. But I wanted to talk to you in private. Because I don’t think we should be sitting around. What time is it?”

  “Coming up for four.”

  “So Feather’s not going to get down to the raft until after five. Even assuming Dylan’s ready and waiting, it’ll be hours before they can get to park officials or the police or whoever the hell they can find. Who are probably not goi
ng to immediately leap into action on the say-so of a hippie chick and a random boat guy with poor interpersonal skills—especially as we’re not even supposed to be here in the first place.”

  “We’re spending the night. I understand that.”

  “Longer than that, Ken. Even if they get right on to a rescue tomorrow morning, they’re going to have to source drilling equipment or dynamite. Which will likely take hours to get together and transport to the canyon. And then it’s all going to have to come up here the way we did—which will take further hours. Not to mention there could be delays from people saying no one’s allowed to blast holes in an archeological site just to rescue some assholes who got themselves stuck in it.”

  “Don’t be a twat, Nolan. They have to get us out.”

  “Of course. But it’s going to be twenty-four hours, minimum, thirty-six—possibly more. And never mind the food or batteries. We can live without those. It won’t be fun, but we can do it. It’s dehydration that will mess us up. How much water do you have left?”

  He made a face. “Half a bottle.”

  “I’m about the same. I thought we would be out of here soon. And we’re physically depleted already from making two big climbs, one of them with the sun on our backs.”

  “You’re making me feel very thirsty, Nolan.”

  “This would be my point. Don’t suppose you snuck a bottle of vodka into your backpack?”

  “I wish.”

  For a moment we watched the others, who stood in a little pool of light in the center of the room. Even from here you could see how little water there was in the pile they’d made. “We may have no choice but to sit it out,” I said. “But we’ve got to take a look down these side passages, just in case.”

  “Looking for what? Another shaft?”

  “That, or could be one of the passages winds back out toward the canyon wall. Or something. We’re going to have a lot of time to kill, Ken. Be dumb not to check if there’s another way out. And keeping busy is probably a good idea.”