The Anomaly

by Michael Rutger

  “They’ll be down at the other end.”

  “Unless the floor slopes this way. And why are we doing this anyway, Nolan? You’re putting yourself at risk, for what?”

  “Because, love,” Ken said, “sooner or later something that’s come out of this pool is going to get hungry. We’ve got enough to deal with already. Stopping it getting worse is all we’ve got.”

  He pulled off his sweatshirt.

  Pierre wore Ken’s clothes on top of his. I wrapped Molly’s shirt around mine. There was no point in my trying to get into her jeans. I tucked mine into my socks, and Pierre did the same. I was aware it was likely to make no difference.

  I perched on the edge of the pool. I still didn’t want to do this. I believed it was the right thing to do, the smart and forward-thinking thing, that it made sense to play a long game in the hope there actually was one. But I still didn’t want to do it.

  I reached out my foot and shoved at a portion of the mossy plant material. It resisted, then broke away. The water beneath looked clearer than it had earlier in the day.

  “Maybe all that cloudy crap was a stage one,” Ken said. “And it’s now forming into bigger things. Like the plant stuff.”

  “That’d be good.” My skin was itching in anticipation, however, and I was trying not to wonder whether it was possible for water to get into the body via the skin’s pores.

  “If you’re really going to do this dumb thing,” Molly said, “head straight for the carbon ball. Everything that lives on Earth is carbon-based, right? Get that one out of the pool and you’ve pulled the plug.”

  “That,” I said, “is smart thinking, Moll. You win.”

  I lowered myself down into the water. It was warm, the temperature of a moderate bath. Body temperature, I guess. My entry stirred the water around, but it stayed clear.

  I walked out a few yards holding the light, to give Pierre room to follow. I’d given Ken my phone but they were keeping the screen turned off for now.

  By the time Pierre had waded up to where I was, my clothes were already wet through. We needed to do this fast.

  We walked farther into the pool, heading toward the middle on the grounds that’s where the balls were likely to be, assuming they’d rolled off the platform at the end in a straight line. “Keep an eye on how far the water comes up your chest,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “That’ll tell us if there’s a slope. If so, then the heaviest ball will be closest. I think. Yes?”

  “I guess. If not?”

  “It’s going to be right at the other end.”

  We kept going. The plant material resisted being torn, seeming almost to knit up again after we’d passed through, though that was presumably merely the effect of currents bringing it back together in our wakes. I realized I was unconsciously keeping both arms up and well clear of the water, even though when we found the balls we were going to have to reach down into it to lift them. Each time I believed I’d thought something through, a few seconds later I realized I’d missed something incredibly obvious. That worried me.

  It scared me, in fact.

  “Nolan?” Pierre spoke quietly, apparently in an effort to prevent the others from hearing. I remembered the way sound had carried across the water when I’d been in here before, however, and pitched my voice even lower.

  “What?”

  “I just felt something.”

  “A ball?”

  “No. It brushed against my thigh. I think it was a fish or something. But…”

  “But what?”

  “It felt kind of…big.”

  “Just keep moving.”

  We advanced, a couple of yards apart, taking our little pool of light with us. About twenty feet from the end, my foot stubbed into something. It was hard and heavy but moved a little. “Wait. I think we’ve got one.”

  Pierre came over and moved his foot around until he found it. “Oh yeah. Okay.”

  I used my elbows to shift the plant stuff aside, and we looked down at the water. It was clear enough that I could see a sphere. Its diameter was about the length of my foot, meaning it was one of the smallest ones.

  “Now what?”

  “Eyes shut. Mouth shut.”

  “What about nose?”

  “Shit. I don’t know.”

  “How about we each close our own nose, go down with one hand on opposite sides of the ball, lift it together?”

  “Pierre—that’s going to be really hard.”

  “I don’t want that water in me.”

  “Neither do I. Okay.”

  We maneuvered around so we were facing each other. I balanced the light on a thick and unbroken section of the plant material and gripped my nostrils shut with my left hand. “Fast, but not too fast—or we’re going to fumble it. On three.”

  We nodded at each other: one, two…

  And dropped at the same time.

  Finding the ball was easy—my hand landed right on it. I slipped my fingers underneath, gave it a beat, and then tried to lift. Pierre did it half a second before me.

  It slipped out of our grasp.

  We surfaced. “Crap,” Pierre said. His voice was shaky, and I didn’t blame him. Being under the water felt really dumb. “Seriously, Nolan—are we sure this is worth it?”

  “It was your idea, dude.”

  “Yeah, but what the hell do I know? I’m just the guy who points the frickin’ camera.”

  “We’re doing it. Try again.”

  We did the same thing, at the same measured pace, with the same result. This time when we surfaced I heard Ken shout.

  “You two okay?”

  “We’re fine. It’s not going well, though.”

  I wiped each eye against the corresponding shoulder. Pierre did the same. The plant material now surrounded us in a circle. It was hard not to feel like it was closing in.

  “We’re going to try this one more time,” I said.

  “Okay.”

  God, he looked young. I didn’t know Pierre’s exact age. Twenty-six, thereabouts. I’m sure he would have been embarrassed to know how much he looked as though he needed reassurance from someone who had experience. A grown-up. A dad.

  But I wasn’t one of those, and it was looking increasingly unlikely I was ever going to be. The best I had for him was a smile and a wink.

  “You know what?” I said. “Screw this.”

  And before he could move, I clamped my eyes and mouth shut, tilted my head forward, and dropped.

  I got my hands around the ball immediately. It was heavy, though. Very heavy.

  I yanked at it with all my strength and it did come up, but I lost my balance and found myself keeling over to the right, the ball slipping out of my fingers.

  Then Pierre’s hands were on it, too.

  We burst up out of the water coughing and blinking, the ball wedged between us. It was very, very heavy.

  “You okay?”

  “I think so,” he said. “This looks like copper, right?”

  “Yeah.” I remembered seeing this sphere the night before, admiring the smoothness of it. The surface was matte now, however, and markedly pocked in places.

  “So now what?”

  “We take it down to the end.”

  Pierre pulled his shoulders back, causing the ball to move smoothly into a firm grip between his arms. He clasped his hands to hold it there, tendons standing out like cords in his arms and neck. We slowly headed together toward the platform. I was aware of my feet knocking against other balls below—we were walking through a field of them now.

  Dropping full-body into the water had screwed any chance of making a precise judgment on whether the level was coming higher up our chests, but it didn’t seem like it was. Which should mean the carbon ball would be right where we were headed.

  Pierre got into position against the end of the pool, steadied himself, and between us we hefted the copper ball up onto the platform. I had my hand ready to hold it there, and then gave it a gentle sho
ve back.

  It didn’t go far, but it seemed like it would stay. “One down, twenty-seven to go.”

  “Like Moll said—let’s find the carbon.”

  Within a couple of minutes we’d found a couple of smaller balls, and we got them successfully up onto the platform using the one-hand-each technique. We even started to fall into something of a rhythm, doing what had to be one of the weirdest tasks I’d undertaken in my life.

  “Wait,” Pierre said. “I think I’ve found it.”

  He had. And how did we know? Because once you pushed the plants aside, the top of the sphere was only just below the surface of the water. It was far more uneven than the balls we’d dealt with so far, suggesting that a lot more of it had dissolved off. But…it was still massive. Of course.

  “I…kinda forgot it was this big.”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling incredibly dumb. “Me too. Can you even move it? At all?”

  He waded around to the other side and braced his hands against the ball. Gathered himself to give it a shove.

  And then disappeared.

  Chapter

  43

  He was there, and then he wasn’t—dropping below the surface so fast it was like he’d blinked out of existence. I called out his name but I knew he hadn’t slipped. I dived under.

  It was dark, with the light from the lamp still balanced above barely penetrating. The water was clear, however, almost back to the way it had been the first time we entered the pool. I glimpsed something on the bottom—not a ball, nor one of the pyramids I knew were there somewhere, but an aggregation of material: as though a portion of the plant matter had sunk and started to build into something else. Maybe that’s how it worked. I didn’t have time to care.

  The dark ball of carbon loomed in front. Pierre was thrashing around next to it. At first I couldn’t see why.

  He made it to the surface, gasped for air—but was immediately whipped back under.

  Something was wrapping itself around his legs.

  A dark, twisting shape.

  As I swam up, I saw another of the same thing, reaching around his waist. I experienced a flashback to something I’d seen painted on a wall—like a spider, but all its legs pointing in the same direction.

  I got to Pierre and grabbed his arm. It took him a second to realize it was me. He reared back, trying to fight. When I saw recognition in his eyes I moved in closer, grabbed him around the waist.

  Then I felt the sticky, muscular contact of something trying to wrap itself around my arm—something far more powerful than me, pure strength wrapped in flesh.

  My feet went out from beneath me as another tentacle grabbed my ankle and yanked it.

  Panic fell like a curtain. I kicked out spastically, driving both legs back and forth, not trying to strike anything in particular. I felt Pierre doing the same.

  I had no air left now and my head was starting to sing, some deeply scared part of my brain urging me to open my mouth and gasp.

  Then Pierre was pulling ahead.

  I kept kicking, wriggling, trying to roll.

  I felt something on my arm and thought it was another tentacle but it was Pierre, one leg still held fast, but trying to pull me along with him.

  Our eyes met, and I nodded:

  One—two—

  We both slammed out with our free legs. I felt mine plunge into something giving. The grip around my other leg was momentarily less tight and I wrenched my knee up toward my chest, pulling it away. Took a glancing blow to the face as Pierre did his own kicking, scything his foot down again and again. I turned to move out of his way and felt myself suddenly free.

  I jammed my foot down against the floor of the pool. The impact jarred my knee but gave me enough momentum to drive myself up and get my head out of the water.

  I gulped air and threw my arm around Pierre’s chest to pull him away from the thing under the surface. His head breached, too, mouth already open, coughing water, and I knew then that if the water was still bad we were dead men swimming, but it didn’t make any difference. You keep fighting anyway.

  It’s hard, kicking sideways underwater. The water doesn’t want to let you. But I kept at it, pulling Pierre with me, and then suddenly there didn’t seem to be any resistance.

  I fell forward, decided to go with it and turned it into a dive, pulling myself forward under the water as fast as I could and trusting Pierre to do the same.

  I passed over several more of the creatures on the bottom, the last far larger than any of the previous. I stopped and drove my foot down into it, and then again.

  Then I thrashed and gasped my way to where Ken and Molly were standing shouting at the other end. They yanked me out so fast I barked my shins on the ledge.

  I rolled out of the way so they could do the same for Pierre, and lay there coughing, panting.

  “What the hell happened?” Ken said.

  “Squid,” Pierre gasped. “Huge big-ass squid.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Did it look like we were screwing around?”

  “There’s other things growing under there,” I said. I was rubbing at my lips with one hand and my eyes with the other, trying to get the water off. But I could taste it in my mouth, the mineral tang. When I coughed it was wet and phlegmy. Some had gotten into my windpipe, too, and into my ears and nose. “This place is nowhere near done making stuff.”

  Ken stood over me. “How much water got inside you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Fingers down the throat, mate.”

  I didn’t think it was going to make any difference but I did what he said. I knelt over the pool and stuck my index and middle fingers as far down my throat as I could. After a while I managed to get my gorge to rise in a vomit reflex, but nothing came out except a long trickle of spit.

  “Okay, so not much,” I said, falling back against the wall. My stomach muscles had locked, feeling empty and torn.

  Ken made Pierre do the same. He managed to get a mouthful of water to come back up. He stayed on his hands and knees afterward, looking out into the room—and specifically at the faint glow right at the other end.

  “Shit,” he said. “We left the light.”

  “You know what? I’m not going back for it.”

  “Did you get the carbon ball?”

  “No, Moll,” I said. “It’s still massive. The four of us together wouldn’t be able to move it—ten people couldn’t. And that’s where we got attacked. That entire plan was screwed from the get-go. I don’t know what we were even thinking of.”

  “So let’s get out of here,” she said. “I don’t want to be sitting waiting when the next thing climbs out.”

  We limped back along the narrow corridor. As we turned into the wider passage a sound echoed down along it. Long, mournful, keening, split into several notes.

  “Christ,” Ken said wearily. “That sounded like a wolf, didn’t it?”

  “No,” I said. “It sounded like two.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Main room.”

  “Which is where the sound came from, Nolan.”

  “Maybe—or it could have just echoed through there from one of the other tunnels. I don’t want to get trapped down a corridor with no exit, do you? Especially the corridor where anything new and bigger is going to arrive.”

  “Good point. All right, well, let’s be big and loud.”

  And so we coughed and talked and made strange pointless noises as we advanced up the passage, my phone on and held above my head. We stopped at the entrance to the main room. We couldn’t see or hear anything, and so headed for the middle.

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” Moll said, turning away.

  We’d disturbed some creatures by returning to the main room. They hadn’t finished what they’d been doing. Ken and I looked at what remained of Gemma. But not for long.

  “Things are getting hungry.”

  Despite what we’d said about being trapped, we headed down the passage toward t
he big stone ball. Maybe because it was the closest thing we could do to leaving. The idea of being stuck in this place with other creatures had been unnerving enough. The knowledge that they were getting to a point where they needed sustenance was far worse.

  They weren’t the only ones. We split the last two granola bars and shared the remaining mouthfuls of water. Nobody suggested only eating or drinking half this time. That way led to dividing and dividing until we were down to crumbs and molecules and eventually lost in homeopathic memories of food. There was no point in going there. We needed far more than what we had, not even less.

  We finished it all.

  There was nothing left now.

  Chapter

  44

  Yes, we were scared. But the body—especially when its most basic needs are not being met, and it is becoming desperate—has a way of closing the shutters, conserving energy when it can. It switches to low-power mode.

  One by one the others fell asleep, or passed out, slipping sideways into a state where awareness was turned inward, wandering the internal halls. The distinction between sleep and wakefulness was becoming less and less clear. Time, too, was ceasing to have the usual depth of meaning. When I glanced at my phone and saw it was 9:43 p.m., the numbers looked arbitrary, like shapes left in sand by the swish of a dog’s tail.

  Part of this was the fact it was permanently dark and we had no mealtimes or sleep periods to make sense of the slow onward march of minutes. But also this place felt sodden with duration. It had existed for longer than any of us had the ability to comprehend. How long had we been in here now? Twenty-four hours? Thirty-six? Either was so minuscule in comparison with the site’s age that in the grand scheme of things it would be rounded down to zero—as would our entire lives. No matter how long we managed to last out, statistically we wouldn’t have been here at all.

  This realization didn’t help my mood, and so I let my mind wander, not trying to push my thoughts in any particular direction. Being at the end of the passage with my back to the big ball reminded me of the last time I’d sat here, talking with Feather. Assuming that was her real name, of course. Assuming anything about her was real, from the hippie clothing—and in retrospect, wasn’t her outfit maybe a little too perfect, right down to the ankh necklace?—to claiming that if I put my mind to it, I had all the information I needed to work out what was happening.