The Anomaly

by Michael Rutger

  “How are we for cigarettes? And yeah, that’s a hint.”

  I lit one for each of us. “Well under a pack.”

  “Christ. Run out of those and we’re really going to see a downturn in the situation. People could get hurt. By me.”

  He thought for a moment.

  “You’re right,” he said. “Let’s go have a look around.”

  From the files of Nolan Moore:

  THE HIDDEN CHAMBER UNDER THE GREAT PYRAMID OF CHEOPS

  Chapter

  22

  After long and thoughtful consideration, Molly declined the opportunity to come looking down pitch-dark passages with us. I think her exact words were “No.”

  Pierre managed to say he wanted to remain in the big room without looking like he was doing so for her sake, continuing a long run of failing to be annoying in a way that meant I was close to having to recategorize him as “actually not annoying after all.” Gemma wanted to come with us. We each took a mouthful of water, left the other two holding position in the middle of the room and—pretty much at random—headed toward the passage at the ten o’clock position in the room.

  “So what did Kincaid say about these passages?” Ken said.

  “A bunch of stuff,” I said. “But to be honest, he lost all credibility for me the moment he failed to mention the great big rolling stone ball. We’re better off investigating using our own eyes than relying on made-up shit.”

  “So how do we know there’s not more of those things up these passages?” Gemma asked, looking dubiously into the darkness beyond the doorway.

  “We don’t. But in everything we’ve seen so far there’s been an elegance of design. Simplicity. That ball has already blocked the main way out of here. Why duplicate, when it means thousands more man-hours’ work?”

  “That’s very now-centric,” she said. “These guys didn’t think like the Apple design department. Why build the pyramids that high, when half as high would do? Because they could. Because Pharaoh told them to. Because they felt like it.”

  This was sufficiently in line with things I’d thought while climbing the shaft that I couldn’t come up with a reply.

  “She’s right,” Ken agreed. “Plus, if you’re saying this is the only entrance they had to block, you’re also saying there’s no other way out. So why risk it?”

  “Whose side are you on?”

  “The side of not getting killed. For future reference, that’s the side I’m always on.”

  “Me too,” I said. “And look. Feather’s not a bad climber. Better than me, definitely. But not like Pierre or Molly. If she hurries or loses her hold and slips and falls down that shaft, then we’re here forever. And we won’t even know it’s happened until we’ve already run out of water. Yes, going up this passage is a risk. But so is not going up it.”

  I was holding the light. I stepped right up to the entrance to the passage. “We’ll do it this way. I’ll go in. You stay back. Nothing happens, you follow.”

  “Nolan, you tosser—we don’t want you killed, either.”

  “I’m immortal,” I said. “Didn’t I mention that?”

  And I stepped into the passage.

  Nothing happened.

  I stood very still for a moment, then moved back into the main room, and out of the way. We all listened carefully for grinding or rolling sounds. There were none.

  “One step doesn’t prove anything,” Ken said.

  “I know.” I’d also known what taking that single step would do, however—halve the tension by breaking down a mental barrier. “But that’s how we’ll do it. In sections. Walk a little way up, using the light to check the floor for anything that looks weird. Then a little farther. And so on.”

  “Fine,” Gemma said. “But I’m going first.”

  “Bollocks you are,” Ken said.

  “Why? Because I’m a woman?”

  “Since you ask, yes. And you can report me to social media all you fucking like.”

  “Have you forgotten who got us stuck in here?”

  “That was an accident,” I said.

  “My accident. I did it. And right now, I’m doing this.”

  She snatched the light and stepped into the passage. Like me, she stayed motionless for a few seconds. Then took a careful step onward. She bent at the waist, looking carefully at the floor, directing the light in a slow sweep from side to side. Then took another step, doing the same. And then another.

  “How’s it look?”

  “Just like rock. I’m going to keep going.”

  “Be careful.”

  “Thanks, Nolan. Otherwise I’d have started jumping up and down.”

  She was methodical. She didn’t, as I might have done, lose patience with the process and start speeding up. She diligently kept her pace slow and consistent, one step at a time. Ken and I stood meanwhile with heads cocked, one ear toward the passage. Neither of us heard anything untoward.

  “There’s a doorway here,” she said. She was about thirty feet up the passage now.

  “What’s it look like?”

  “A dark and scary-ass doorway. I’ll keep going.”

  And farther she went, until the glow from her lamp was a bare flicker in the blackness, saying little as she walked but for a mention that she’d seen another doorway, on the other side, and then another.

  She went far enough, in fact, that I started to notice something about the light. I took a step into the passage myself. I walked ten feet along, against Ken’s foul-mouthed protestations, and got out my phone.

  “I thought that was supposed to be turned off,” he said.

  “I forgot. I’ll do it in a minute.”

  I found the app I’d been thinking of and loaded it, then laid my iPhone on the floor. Gemma came back toward us, still keeping her light pointed at the ground but now walking at a normal pace. “What are you doing?”

  “It’s a spirit level. Look.”

  We all squatted down around it. “There’s a slight tilt downward as it leads away from the main room. Same as the main passage, in fact. Maybe not quite as much.”

  “And you think that proves nothing’s going to come rolling this way and squish us like bugs?”

  “Doesn’t prove it, no. It could slope in the other direction, way down there, like a parabola, and there’s probably someone smart enough to say what the angle and distances would need to be depending on the size and weight of a hypothetical stone ball, but it sure as hell isn’t me. I’m just suggesting that the downward slope makes it a little less likely that we need to worry.”

  We straightened up. Looked at each other. And started walking together, very carefully, down the passage.

  We weren’t measuring but I’d say it was about a hundred and fifty yards long. At the end it stopped in a wall: flat, neatly worked, final. I hadn’t really been expecting a set of stairs with an illuminated EXIT sign, but it was still extremely disappointing.

  “One down, seven to go,” Ken muttered.

  “We passed a bunch of doors on the way,” Gemma said. “You never know—could be something leads off one of them.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “It’s worth looking. And make sure we keep checking the ceiling of the passage on the way back, too. That’s how Molly spotted the entrance to the shaft.”

  “Yeah,” Ken said. “Not feeling quite so proud of her for that now, if I’m honest.”

  “But that’s how you found this place,” Gemma said. “Okay, being trapped here for a while is sub-awesome, but it’s still good, isn’t it?”

  “Ask me again when I’ve got a pint in one hand and a large piece of food in the other.”

  So we walked back up the passage, Gemma shining her light at the ceiling, revealing only a smooth, consistent arch.

  The first room we encountered was on the left. It was different from ones we’d previously seen, in that it was sternly oblong, walls, floors and ceilings meeting at right angles. It was about twenty feet long and ten wide and high and completely empty.
The floor was thick with the dark dust we’d seen in other places. The end wall was entirely covered, floor to ceiling and wall to wall, by symbols neatly chiseled into the rock.

  I hesitate to call them hieroglyphics. I’d be lying if I pretended to be fluent or even competent in that writing system, but I’ve spent enough time looking at photographs to be able to dependably recognize it. There was a superficial resemblance, in that some of the symbols looked as though they could represent real-life objects—corn, a mountain, a river—and groups of them were neatly arranged so as to suggest they had an aggregated meaning. But there the similarity stopped, and despite the pictograms dotted along the lines, to me it actually looked more like some kind of cuneiform.

  “We’re waiting,” Gemma said.

  “Huh?”

  She looked at me, eyebrow raised. “This is the moment where you trace your finger over those symbols and—at first haltingly, and then with increasing breathless fluency—tell us exactly what it all says.”

  “You’d be thinking of a real archeologist.”

  “Good. Because in the movies, most of the time it turns out to be a curse that raises an ancient demon or something, and to be honest that’s kind of the last thing we need right now.”

  “No idea what it says?” Ken asked.

  “None,” I said. “I’m sure this is what Kincaid described as hieroglyphs. But that’s not what they are, at least not Egyptian. Egypt was big in popular culture back then, and they leaped to conclusions. I don’t know what this actually is. Phoenician. Ancient Anasazi. JavaScript, for all I know.”

  We left the room and walked to the first door on the other side of the passage. This led to another, narrower passageway.

  “Ha,” Ken said. “This heads toward the canyon wall, doesn’t it?”

  “Well, yes. Though it’s a long way from here.”

  “Still worth checking out. And look—more of that writing.”

  This time there was a single row of the composite characters, running along the wall about four feet from the ground. I lagged behind the others as we walked deeper into the side passage, and yes, I did even trace my finger along the carvings, as if that might help. The symbols in the previous room had been a seamless, orderly mass; these came in clumps, about three feet long, with a gap of a few inches between each section. Like sentences, perhaps, or observations or instructions. Somebody more learned than I was going to have a field day with this stuff.

  Assuming they got to see it.

  “Christ,” Gemma said suddenly. She sounded some distance away. I realized they’d gotten twenty or thirty feet ahead of me, and hurried to catch up.

  “Careful, mate,” Ken said.

  They were standing close to a side wall. At first I couldn’t see why. Then I realized the passage stopped abruptly right in front of them.

  Chapter

  23

  Gemma’s headlamp wasn’t cutting it so Ken pulled out his light, too. Together they shone them into the blackness.

  “Hell is this?”

  Water, appeared to be the answer. A lot of it. It started nine inches below the ledge we were standing on. It was clear and still, and shining light down through it revealed a flat rock floor three or four feet below.

  I maneuvered myself carefully to the edge of the drop. The walls on each side were flat and smooth and disappeared into blackness.

  “Well, that’s our fluids problem solved,” Ken said.

  “Seriously?” Gemma said. “I’m not drinking that.”

  “Why? Looks clear to me.”

  “But where’s it come from?”

  I took Ken’s light and shone it upward. The roof of the room was about six feet above my head. It, too, had been worked—of course; this was hardly a natural feature—but was cracked and uneven. “Above, maybe,” I said. “Some of it, at least. Dripping down through the rock, very, very slowly.”

  “Filtered, in other words,” Ken said. “Nice. Shame we don’t have any single malt with us.”

  “I’m still not drinking it,” Gemma said. “We don’t know how long it’s been sitting here. It’s got to be full of bugs and microbes.”

  I squatted and looked at the water. Even close up, it seemed very clear. Strangely clear, in fact—as you would indeed have thought that standing water would become infested with algae and microscopic creatures.

  I sat on the floor and took off my shirt and shoes and socks, putting phone, lighter, and cigarettes safely to one side. I discovered a battered and bent matchbook in my back pocket that I hadn’t even realized was there, and added that to the pile.

  Ken watched this process. “Fuck are you doing, Nolan?”

  “Taking a closer look.”

  I swung my legs over the edge and down into the pool. It was not cold, though below body temperature.

  I eased myself down into it. The water came about halfway up my chest.

  “There’s no lifeguard on duty, dude,” Gemma said.

  I turned my headlamp on and walked out into the pool. The rock underfoot was smooth. The water stretched around me, the far edges hidden beyond the glow of the light, the surface fading into darkness as though it went on forever.

  I started moving diagonally, in the hope of finding its extent, and I kept a close eye on the floor as I went. After about twenty yards I started to make out a wall.

  When I got to it I saw there were small square openings in a line along it.

  “See anything?”

  Ken’s voice was surprisingly clear. I looked up and saw now that the space was domed above, in a low curve.

  “Holes in the wall,” I said. “I assume that’s what keeps the level constant. Water drips in, then slowly pours back out of these holes. Keeps it from ever getting high enough to flood the rest of the passages, I guess.”

  “Does that also explain why it isn’t manky?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Though it’s going to be a very slow process.” I dipped my hand into the water and brought it up to my face. “No smell at all.”

  I turned from the wall and took another diagonal course, this time heading right. After a few yards my foot met resistance. I looked down and saw why.

  “There’s some of those pyramid-shaped rock things in the water,” I said. “Sticking up from the floor.”

  I had in mind to make it over to the opposite wall, but then something else caught my eye.

  “Nolan,” Gemma said, “maybe you should come back now?”

  “In a minute.”

  I changed direction and waded straight toward the end of the room. I’d been assuming the pool would stop at a wall there, too, but soon saw this wasn’t the case. Instead there was a lip about the same height above the water as it had been at the entrance, and an open area beyond.

  I sloshed up to the edge of this and stood looking for a full minute—silent long enough for Ken to call out.

  “You okay?”

  “You might want to come see this,” I said.

  By the time they’d made it across I’d hoisted myself up out of the water and was sitting on the edge. I shone my light so they could see where they were going. Gemma moved quickly and confidently, still regarding the water with great suspicion. Ken looked sufficiently ridiculous as he doggedly waded toward me out of the gloom that I couldn’t help laughing.

  “Fuck’s up with you?”

  “No longer shall I use the expression ‘a duck out of water.’ Going forward, I shall think of ‘a Ken in water.’”

  “Fair enough, mate. Much as I have abandoned use of the term ‘wanker,’ because I’ve found saying ‘a total Nolan’ does the same job.”

  Gemma ignored us, staring at what I’d already seen on the platform beyond. She put her elbows up on the edge and scrabbled out, then turned to help me with Ken.

  We stood together and looked. “Okay. This is just taking the piss now,” Ken said, as if personally affronted.

  The ledge, platform, was thirty feet wide and ten deep. It sloped a little, a few inch
es higher at the back than the front. In the perfect center of the space was a standing stone. That’s what it looked like, anyway—the kind of thing you see in tilting rings in Europe, or at the edges of Stonehenge. A lump of hard, old rock, maybe four feet tall and two wide.

  All around it, arrayed in three neat rows, were cubes of rock. Ten behind the standing stone, ten in front, eight in a row that included it as the centerpiece. Twenty-eight perfect cubes. But that wasn’t the end of it.

  On each of these stood a sphere. They were different sizes, ranging from about six inches in diameter to three feet, and each was subtly different in color.

  “What is this stuff? Metal?”

  “Looks like it. Or minerals.” The sphere in the middle at the front looked a lot like copper. One a couple of cubes away could have been iron. The others were various types of ore. One was a cloudy, translucent shade.

  As we wandered among the spheres I spotted another at the back, previously hidden in shadow. This was much larger, perhaps five feet in diameter, and stood in a depression on the floor rather than on a cube. It was very dark, almost black, with a matte surface. Like the smaller examples it looked like it had been stamped out of a mold, or poured into one.

  Ken appeared next to me. “So what’s all this?”

  “I have no idea,” I said. “Some kind of ritual pantheon thing, maybe—one representing each of the key gods. Or a stylized model of the solar system, complete with comets. Someone’s rock collection. I don’t know.”

  “Look at this.”

  Gemma was standing at the stone in the middle. The top of it had been smoothed off, leaving a surface that looked as though it had been sliced with a sharp knife. The resulting plane was smooth and polished. Into it had been carved more of the hieroglyphics we’d seen along the corridor. This time they were arrayed in a neat grid, ten by ten.

  “There’s a hundred,” Ken said. “Does that mean anything?”

  “Not to me. I should know whether the local tribes worked a decimal system, but I don’t. I mean, we’ve got ten fingers and ten toes, so it’s possible. But this is something else for the smart boys and girls to figure out.”