The Anomaly

by Michael Rutger

  I kept blinking and opening my mouth wide to stretch my face, keeping myself awake, believing one of us should keep watch. The amount of Gemma’s abdomen that had been missing when we returned from the pool made it clear that it wasn’t going to be long before the things abroad in this place became hungry enough to regard us as a foodstuff worth tackling, even while we were capable of self-defense. I wasn’t sure how much of a fight we’d realistically be able to put up, but starting from a position of fast sleep seemed a dumb tactical move. Not least because if I’d been right in thinking I could hear not one, but two wolves, that might be the case with some of the other…

  My thoughts braked suddenly.

  They skidded, as if I’d blown past a mental stop sign and knew I ought to back up. I could tell I was half-asleep by the way it felt like I’d been driving through my mind, watching ideas go by like the view out of a car window.

  But part of me knew I was awake, and had just thought something to which I needed to pay attention.

  There’s a story here.

  An arc.

  Hadn’t Feather said that? Something along those lines? I believed she had. I was pretty sure. And I belatedly realized I’d interpreted the last word as the term I’d heard in a thousand meetings in LA. Partly because of the word “story” before it. Because that’s what I used to do.

  But she hadn’t meant it that way. She’d been giving me a clue. She’d been spelling it differently.

  She meant “ark.”

  I sat up straight, far more alert now.

  Of course. An ark—where the animals went in, two by two.

  I couldn’t begin to understand how that worked, but I’d seen the evidence with my own eyes and I was done questioning it.

  And maybe…

  I was aware I was engaging in exactly the kind of speculative thinking Gemma had mocked back at the trailhead, before this whole disaster began—that style of is it therefore perhaps possible that two plus two equals seven? faux-reasoning that’ll take you anywhere you want to go if you’re not careful. But right now nobody was keeping score.

  And maybe…

  Maybe that’s the way it had actually been.

  Perhaps at some point in prehistory something like this had been discovered before. An ancient people had stumbled upon a similar machine, hidden deep in a cave, and triggered the same process. Maybe the paintings in the gallery beyond the smelling room were even a record of this.

  And instead of going in, two by two, animals came out.

  And maybe this had happened somewhere in the Middle East, too—because hadn’t Feather implied there was more than one of these sites?—and was such a head-spinningly strange event (even to people with a less science-dominated grip on what’s supposed to be possible and what’s not) that it became enshrined in a myth as a cautionary tale…for long enough that a mangled version was eventually wrapped into the collection of stories, history, and legends that became the Bible.

  An ark. And what else was part of that story? What was, in fact, the defining theme of it?

  A flood.

  It was coming on quickly now, a rush of things I knew or had at least read more than once and should have been able to put together much earlier—and perhaps might have, if they’d seemed in any way related before.

  The Hopi Indians, like a lot of cultures—as I’d told Gemma, at tedious length—cherished a flood myth. I couldn’t remember the specifics of it, but I realized I didn’t have to. It was right there in my hands.

  That’s what Feather had meant.

  On the night before we climbed up into the cavern she’d borrowed my phone and looked through my notes. The only problem was that there were a thousand pages cached onto there and I didn’t have time to sift through all of them.

  But then I realized I didn’t need to. Partly because I already understood now where this was going. Also because the app readily presented me with a history of which files had been opened most recently. What she’d looked at.

  And yes, she’d read documents on the Hopi. Which wouldn’t previously have struck me as significant—we were in Hopi territory, after all, and she’d asked to look at my note stash after I’d been talking about Newspaper Rock—but now that information alone was enough to take me the final steps.

  The Hopi believe the world we live in is the gods’ fourth run at it. The first attempt was erased by fire. The second was wiped out when two minor gods left their posts at the axes of the planet, causing the spin to tilt, provoking an ice age.

  The next world was notably more advanced than the previous two, in which humans had lived with the animals or in small villages. This third version was their Atlantean age, with a far larger population and more advanced civilization—but of course it went to pieces. The people created a “giant flying shield” called a patuwvota—which naturally some have interpreted as an aircraft or alien spaceship—and used it to attack a foreign city. They retaliated, and it all kicked off.

  Seeing this, the boss god Sotuknang decided to get eschatological once more and brought down a flood. But the good guys—the ones “with a song in their hearts”—were allowed to survive, and given another chance in a further world. Instead of being uniformly perfect like the previous ones, the Fourth World (called Tuwaqachi) was going to be possessed of height and depth, hot and cold, lush and barren areas, a more challenging environment—the idea being to keep the turbulent humans occupied with staying alive, rather than attacking each other. While it was being prepared and the planet was still flooded, the worthy were assisted by Anu Sinom—the “ant people.” These beings escorted the remaining Hopi to a place where they could wait out the transition, and meanwhile prove their piousness and fealty to the gods.

  That place was a system of caves.

  Of course, the legend didn’t say where it was. But the Hopi, heirs to the oldest-known Native American tribe, the Anasazi, had an ancient custom of trekking hundreds of miles from their current homes all the way to…the Grand Canyon.

  Why?

  And why did some of the figures on Newspaper Rock strongly resemble the paintings we’d discovered in the adjunct to this complex—pictures that Feather claimed were fifty thousand years old? I had no proof that her information was trustworthy. But I had no proof to the contrary, and I’d spent enough time looking at reproductions of Neolithic cave art to believe they seemed convincing. Not least because the Lascaux paintings hadn’t even been discovered until 1940—thirty years after Kincaid found this cavern, which had never been entered since.

  Neither he nor anybody else would have known what to fake. Which meant they had to be real.

  What I didn’t understand was why the Palinhem Foundation would want to locate a place like this. It wasn’t out of intellectual interest, that’s for sure. Feather had sounded triumphant, evangelical. Then I saw the last document she’d looked at.

  The Hopi Prophecies.

  An ancient list of nine signs that were supposed to portend the ending of the Fourth World, in preparation for Armageddon and rebirth in the Fifth. There are those who believe that—with liberal interpretation—most have already been fulfilled. The First Sign mentions the coming of the white man. Others perhaps prefigured railways, catastrophic oil spills, the Internet, and 1960s counterculture.

  Only the Ninth had not yet been deemed to have come fully to pass, as it involved a blue star appearing in the heavens and crashing to Earth. Other elements of that Ninth Prophecy, however—the “white man battling against people in other lands”—well, yeah, that’s a known thing.

  You could choose therefore to believe we were on the brink of fulfilling the prophecy, waiting only for that blue star/meteor/spaceship to push us over. You could believe this if you were a little crazy, and if you were a little crazy, then you might want to get ahead of the curve and preemptively claim the place to hide out.

  A site waiting patiently to repopulate the Earth.

  You would try to find the ark.

  I knew my reasonin
g didn’t stand up straight yet. It didn’t feel wrong, though.

  It felt very far from wrong.

  I heard Molly’s voice, quiet. “Oh dear God.”

  Head still deep in my notes, I looked up from the phone to see her staring up the passage toward the main room. I angled the glow from my phone screen to make it brighter.

  Something stood at the edge of the glow, remaining mostly in shadow.

  It was about the size of a young horse. It had a clump of algae on one bulky shoulder, and its hide was still wet. It stared back at us curiously, angling its head.

  A single dead-straight and pure white horn protruded from its forehead.

  It turned and walked away into the darkness.

  Molly didn’t move a muscle. “What…was that?”

  “A unicorn,” I said.

  Chapter

  45

  We woke the other two. We discussed it, very briefly, and the consensus was firmly in favor of not following the animal Molly and I had just seen. We were plain terrified now.

  “Come on, Nolan,” Ken said, and even he sounded freaked out. “You’re now badly in the realm of made-up shit.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “The weird thing about unicorns is that the Greeks never mentioned them in mythology. Only in their natural histories. They didn’t think unicorns were legendary. They believed they were real. And the thing we saw was only fairly horselike. Who knows, maybe it was a young Elasmotherium.”

  “Which is?”

  “Was. Northern European style of rhino. Which some people think may have outlasted the most recent ice age and overlapped with humans, maybe even giving rise to stories of reclusive unicorns.”

  I took them through the thoughts I’d just had, the ideas I’d mashed together into a possible explanation for this place. Molly immediately began asking questions and making objections, while nervously glancing up the passage. Pierre stared at me like I’d started talking in a foreign language.

  Ken, bless him, simply went with it. If Satan himself turned up at Ken’s house—wreathed in sulfur and lightning bolts—Ken would give him a hard time for not bringing enough wine/cigarettes/vodka but otherwise tell him to pull up a deck chair and make himself at home.

  “This ball, though,” he said. We were beside it, huddled close together, apart from Pierre, who was standing a couple of yards up the passage keeping an eye out. “Assuming you’re right, Nolan. Bonkers though it sounds. Why trap everything in here? If this is the machine that reboots life on Earth, you want it all to be able to get out of here afterward, right?”

  “To which there’s three possible answers.”

  “Christ, you and your fucking brain. Can’t there just be one answer to any given question, and it always be good news?”

  “First is…the ball wasn’t supposed to be triggered. It was a last-resort defense in case the site came under attack, and it’s just bad luck Gemma stood on the thing.”

  “That idea’s shit. Next.”

  “Second is there is a way out, but we haven’t found it yet. Best bet for that is the other end of the paintings room.”

  “Which we can’t get at. That idea’s shit, too.”

  “Third is there’s some way of resetting the physical environment, once the things created in here are ready to leave and populate the cleansed Earth. Of moving the ball and reopening the passage.”

  “How?” Moll said. “Turning the whole place off and on again?”

  “Don’t see that helping us either way,” Ken said. “I’m always happy to take a stroll down Woo-Woo Lane with the Anomaly-meister, but I don’t think moving the ball’s the answer. It’s a very heavy thing at the bottom of a slope. Physics is not our friend on this one.”

  “I know,” I said. “The third answer sucks, too. I’m handing the Talking Stick over to somebody else.”

  Nobody said anything for a while.

  “What if there’s another trigger?”

  Pierre spoke as we were gathering ourselves to cautiously head back up the passage, for no better reason than it didn’t seem like a great idea to be trapped with nowhere to run, should it come to it. Which it was increasingly feeling like it might.

  “Not for, this ball,” he said. His speech was losing normal patterns, words clumping in odd ways. I’m sure mine was, too. “What if there’s a fourth answer? Something else we can move by pushing something or stepping on something or whatever?”

  “We haven’t seen anything like that.”

  “No. But we’ve been poking around in the dark, only looking for ways out. We haven’t rigorously checked every corner of every room. Like it’s a Tomb Raider game or something. Because, you know, it kind of almost is.”

  Molly shook her head. Her voice was a dehydrated croak. “Pierre, there’s a hundred rooms. And God knows how much corridor. With…random things roaming them.”

  “And the logic’s not secure, either,” I said. “This could be a failsafe designed precisely to stop people like us from unleashing the process before the proper time, or from doing it in the wrong order. Feather implied there could be more than one site like this.”

  “She did?”

  “Sounds like the permafrost expedition that Kristy’s on could be wandering into similar territory. Or was deliberately sent there, in that hope.”

  “Shit,” Molly said. “I hope she’s okay.”

  Molly has never met Kristy. She’s heard almost nothing about her from me, and I would imagine little from Ken. I felt absurdly touched that she would care. “Me too.”

  “Nolan,” Pierre said. There was a faint tremor in his voice. “It’d be cool if you could stop proving there’s no way out, okay? I kind of need the idea. Even if it’s wrong.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “And, yes—it’s possible the ball’s there to seal the site while it’s in Genesis mode, and there’s some way of releasing this shit into the wild at the right time.”

  “I don’t think so,” Molly said. “There’s nothing to eat here. I’ll bet most of the rooms in this place were originally designed for storage. Like, grain and stuff. They’re empty. How were these things supposed to survive without food? We found the place by accident at the wrong time, when it wasn’t ready for action and hadn’t been stocked with food and freaking Ant People, or whatever, and we triggered a failsafe. We’re done. And we’re the only food in here.”

  “Molly,” Pierre snapped. “Seriously. Shut the fuck up.”

  “We have got one proper light and one small one and no idea how much power is left in either of them.”

  “I’ve still got the camera light.”

  “Great. So what do we do? Grid-search thousands of feet of floor and wall, stepping on every inch and pressing anything we can find? How long will that take? Plus there are fucking wolves in here. And saber-toothed tigers. And they’re going to get hungry, too.”

  “I still think the paintings room is our best bet,” Ken said. “Or…well, there is that other pool room.”

  Molly and Pierre turned to him and said: “What?”

  “It’s crystal clear,” Molly said.

  She was lying on her front, hanging over the pool, holding the light down close to it. Ken stood at the back of the group, keeping an eye on the corridor behind us.

  “Yes,” I said, “but—”

  “Don’t ‘but’ me,” she said. The more tired she got, the more Molly was turning into team mom again. A mom who was moreover done with taking her kids’ crap for one afternoon and in need of a weapons-grade alcoholic beverage, stat. “You drank from the other pool and you were fine. A few hours ago, you and Pierre ended up with postgenesis soup inside you, with the water clear again, and you both seem okay, right?”

  “We need to drink, Nolan,” Ken said. “Or we’re done.”

  Just talking about it was causing us to look hungrily at the pool—gaunt, drawn faces half-lit.

  “It may have been Gemma’s blood that kicked the other pool into action,” I said cautiously. “I’m tired eno
ugh to speculate that ancient ideas of blood sacrifice could even be a mangled memory of a process just like this. Give the gods blood, and they will provide…weird stuff. In fact—”

  “What?”

  “The trigger plate. The one that made the big ball roll. She’d dripped blood onto that, too. Maybe that’s what kicked this whole thing off, instead of her treading on it.”

  “Could be, mate. And something else struck me earlier. Those three letters chipped in the wall next to it.”

  “What about them?”

  “Little extra nick at the end? Maybe it wasn’t the start of another letter. Maybe it was an apostrophe.”

  “Huh?”

  “Maybe instead of a name, whoever put them there was trying to write ‘DON’T’—as in ‘Don’t screw around with the pool down this corridor, because it will fuck you up.’”

  “Don’t care about any of this,” Molly said. “I need to drink.”

  “Do we have anything made of glass?”

  “Why?”

  “It’s the least reactive thing in water.”

  Molly dug in her backpack. “No,” she said, though she kept digging. “Oh.” She held up a small glass pot. “There’s this.”

  It was her empty lip balm container. “Got a tissue?”

  She found one and handed it to me. I used this to wipe the residual balm out of the jar. She rooted around in the bag again, and came up with some tweezers.

  “Would this help keep your fingers out of the water?”

  “Not only that.” I got out my cigarette lighter. When the jar was as clean as I could get it, I held it with the tweezers and sparked up a flame. I played it methodically over the inside and outside of the little pot, producing a not-unpleasant smell from a burned smear of balm. It made me realize how long it had been since I’d smelled anything but cold rock and endless dust. Something sweet, and warm.