The Anomaly

by Michael Rutger

  “It’s not perfect,” I said.

  “Close enough,” Ken muttered. “Get on with it. I don’t want anything coming up behind while we’re trapped here.”

  “Wait,” Pierre said.

  He was standing at the end of the ledge overhanging the pool. He had the camera on his shoulder and the strong, hard, white light above its lens was directed straight across the space in front of us, revealing for the first time that this pool room was significantly larger than the other one. Much wider, and higher, and far, far longer.

  “Fuck’s sake,” Ken said.

  He sounded more exhausted and defeated than I’d ever heard him sound before. Than I’d heard anyone sound, ever. Because not only down the end but along both sides were vast tiered platforms, holding hundreds of metal spheres, thousands of them—all of them far larger than the ones we’d seen before—stretching back, rank after rank, into the darkness.

  While I was staring at these I heard a little splash, and looked down to see that the lip balm pot had slipped out of the tweezers, and was now sinking to the bottom of the pool.

  Chapter

  46

  We stood looking out over the water until Pierre turned off the light, and then sat and stared into blackness. Nobody gave me a hard time about dropping the pot.

  Ken and I shared a cigarette. There were only two left now. Just after I stubbed it out, a long, howling growl echoed down the corridor. It didn’t sound like a wolf. I don’t know what it sounded like. The kind of thing people heard a very, very long time ago, prowling outside their cave in the night. The kind of thing that made people afraid of the dark. It didn’t seem like whatever made the sound was close. That yielded little reassurance. We had nowhere to go. It would find us sooner or later.

  Pierre turned the camera light back on and directed it up the corridor. For the first time I noticed that there was a flat and polished section on the wall there. In the middle was a single large pictogram. It looked familiar—the one with the short horns—and I knew where I’d seen it: on the console rock in the other pool room. The light went past it and found Ken, and I saw he was looking thoughtful.

  “What’s on your mind?”

  “What did Feather say? Before she left.”

  “I told you.”

  “Tell me again, Nolan. As precisely as you can remember.”

  “She said Dylan was dead, or told me again. She said the thing about an arc, which I’m now thinking she meant another way. As discussed. That’s it.”

  He shook his head, frustrated. “Something else.”

  “There really wasn’t.”

  “There was, Nolan. It nipped at me even at the time, but there was other crap going on and I blew past it. Fuck. Think. What was it?”

  I closed my eyes. This made me feel lost and nauseous. I half opened them again. I couldn’t recall anything else. I could barely remember the things I’d already mentioned. “There’s nothing else, Ken.”

  “Paintings,” Pierre said. “Didn’t she say something about the paintings?”

  And then there it was. “Actually, yes. She said they were fifty thousand years old. That’s all.”

  “That’s it,” Ken said quietly.

  “What?”

  “You mean,” Molly said, “how would she know they were that old?”

  “No,” Ken said. “Well, yeah. There’s that. But roll back further, Moll. You, me, and Nolan were there in that cavern. We saw the paintings, and then the light died on us before we could get to the end. But what happened when we got back to the main room? Why did we hurry back?”

  “Because…shouting,” she said. She was frowning with concentration, like someone in eighth-grade algebra keen to show she was following along. “We were in the fissure on the way back and we heard Gemma shouting.”

  “Right. So we ran back in here and dealt with the clear and present danger. Then what?”

  “We ate,” I said.

  “And then?”

  “Ken—can you just say the thing, whatever it is?”

  “No. I need you to walk it through for me. To make sure I’m not missing something. After we ate, what then?”

  “Fuck’s sake, Ken. You and I went to check out the pool straight after, thinking we’d try the water despite the risk. We bailed on the idea because of the algae and when we got back that’s when Gemma dropped her bombshell about Feather’s phone and the photo on it. We were deep into that when we heard Feather clapping. The end. So?”

  “And we talked to her and she pretended to go, and then later you talked to her…And that’s when she mentioned the paintings. Right?”

  “Right.”

  Ken grinned at me. It was tired and lopsided, but it was real. “Come on, Nolan. Get there yourself, you muppet.”

  I looked at him, frowning—and finally it dawned. “Shit,” I said. “Are you sure?”

  “Not a hundred percent, but bloody close. It’s why I made you remember it step by step.”

  I was silent for a moment, thinking back through the sequence of events again as rigorously as I could. “Christ.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Please, you two,” Molly said. “Stop doing this.”

  “Feather knew what we’d been doing because she’d been listening behind the rock during the day,” I said. “Staying quiet. Eavesdropping on everything we said. Right?”

  “Okay, so?”

  “But we never mentioned the paintings.”

  Molly blinked at me. “What?”

  “Pierre,” I said. “When did you first hear about them?”

  “When you and I went to check out the smelly room, and found the crap on the floor had melted.”

  “None of us told you about them before?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely sure.”

  “So,” I said. “Given she could not have overheard us, how did Feather know about them?”

  “Oh,” Molly said. “Oh.”

  “You’re still only halfway there,” Ken said, however. “Who knows what that bitch knows, or the people she works for. She talked about another site like this in Alaska. Maybe there’s others around the world. Could be they’ve all got cave paintings. That is not the point.”

  I frowned. “Well then, what is?”

  “It’s not that she knows about the paintings,” Molly said, evidently a step ahead of me now. “It’s that she knows that we’ve seen them.”

  “And how would she know that, Nolan?”

  “She…she could have assumed,” I said. “We’d been exploring. She just assumed we’d found them.”

  “Is that the way it sounded?”

  “No,” I admitted. “She told me the age as if answering a question. A question she’d overheard.”

  “Which you asked…”

  “…when we were there.”

  Pierre looked back and forth between us. “But what does that mean?”

  “It means you can get from the other side of that ball, to the other end of the paintings cavern,” Ken said. “That’s the only way she could have been in position to hear us, the only way she could know we’d found them.”

  “It means there’s a way out,” I said. “Maybe.”

  “It’s the best we’ve got,” Ken said, standing. He staggered, badly, veering back into the wall as if very drunk. Tried to right himself, but staggered again, and this time toppled heavily to the ground.

  “Fuck,” he said. He looked old for a moment, lying on his side, trying to get up. Pierre and I went to help. And we both immediately keeled over onto our sides.

  It would have been funny, except it wasn’t.

  All three of us eventually got upright. Then Pierre and I reached a hand down to Molly, who’d simply watched all this, goggle-eyed. She took them and we pulled her up, gently.

  “If we’re going to try this,” she said, “I think it needs to be soon.”

  “No,” Ken said. He looked something like his usual self again, b
ut exhausted and drawn. “It needs to be now.”

  Then, from a distance—but closer than last time—came the sound of a low, rumbling growl, mixed with a keening howl.

  “Or even sooner,” he said.

  Chapter

  47

  Five minutes later we were in the stinking room. It was noticeably warmer than before and the smell had gotten worse, unbelievably. More open in texture, fresher, making it easier to work out what it reminded you of. The deeply, offensively rank odor of something two days into rotting—like a dead seal on a beach, or a rat caught in a trap in hot sun, but multiplied ten-thousand-fold. It assaulted the eyes and stomach like a living entity, making you retch until you coughed and your stomach heaved.

  Despite this, Pierre waded out into it for a few yards before retreating with the rest of us to the doorway. “It’s more liquid than it was.”

  “You think?”

  “Definitely,” he said. “Earlier it was like molasses. It’s looser now.”

  “Still pretty thick, though,” Ken said. “And we don’t know how deep it is down the end, do we?”

  “The room’s only thirty yards long,” I said. “We can make it that far.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Of course we can.”

  “Look,” Ken muttered, “I can’t fucking swim, all right?”

  “Seriously?”

  “I grew up in London in the 1970s and I’m not a masochist, Cali-boy. Life on land only got started in the first place because all the fish decided to get the fuck out of the North Sea because it was too bloody cold. Assuming,” he added, “that evolution…is even a thing. Which, judging by what’s happening here right now, it may not be. Christ.”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “We’ll get you across.”

  “How?”

  “Basic life-saving technique,” Pierre said. “I swim on my back, arm around you from behind, pull you along.”

  “Fuck’s sake.”

  Pierre nodded decisively. “Two minutes,” he said, turning toward the main room.

  “Where are you going?”

  “The drives are in my pack.”

  “Drives?”

  “Hard drives. The footage of everything we’ve seen in here. I’m not going without them.”

  “Okay, but Jesus—we discussed this,” I said. “We stay together.”

  Which was still a sensible policy, and we were all keen to get a break from the smell, too…

  But it was a mistake.

  It was clear from the state of Gemma’s remains that something had visited her again in our absence.

  I reached for my backpack but realized there was nothing in there I needed. Ken and Molly made the same call about their own packs. The lighter we were traveling, the better. We quickly loaded the portable drives into Pierre’s bag.

  “How waterproof are these disks?”

  “Not very. I’m thinking I’ll take the pack across first, holding it up above my head, then throw it up into the fissure. That’ll give me a chance to assess the liquid, too, and check if there’s anything we need to know about below the surface.”

  “Like what?” Molly asked nervously.

  “Just pyramids. Most of the rooms here have got them,” he said. “And they’re getting hotter, right? Maybe that’s what made the gunk in there loosen up. We don’t want to trip over one. Or get burned by it, if they’re even hotter now.”

  “Okay, good thinking,” I said. “Let’s put the phones in your bag, too.”

  As we were doing that, there was a sound. The one we’d been hearing for the last half hour. Much louder this time, however, and coming from the corridor that led to the original pool. A kind of a grunting noise, but with a whispering texture around the edges.

  It wasn’t good. It wouldn’t have been good if we’d heard it in the middle of a sunlit meadow. Trapped in a pitch-dark abandoned ancient anomaly half a mile underground, it was really very not-good indeed.

  “What the hell is that?” Molly whispered.

  “I don’t know. But it’s not wolves. It’s too deep, too loud. Too big-sounding. To be honest, I don’t want to find out.”

  The sound came again, but from a different corridor.

  “There’s two of them,” Ken said quietly. “They’re grid-searching, looking for us. Let’s go. Now.”

  Molly, Ken, and I stood in the corridor outside the room. There was a brief whispered debate about whether it’d make sense to divest ourselves of clothes while crossing, sending them ahead in Pierre’s backpack, to stop us taking the appalling smell with us afterward. The opposing view—that we wanted as little skin contact with the gunk as possible—won out, not least as the only thing we’d have to wipe the crap off with after the crossing was…our clothes.

  Molly positioned the camera on her shoulder and directed the light down the room. It reached far enough to catch the edge of the fissure, giving Pierre a straight-line course.

  “Be careful,” Ken told him. “And if you feel anything moving under there, come the hell back out.”

  Pierre nodded, held his pack up above his head, and started to walk into the liquid.

  “It’s still thicker than water,” he said as the level got above his knees. “Though—” He stopped talking abruptly and retched. “Holy crap it smells bad.”

  But he kept going. The depth increased rapidly. Within another minute it was up to his waist. Then his chest. He was making near-constant coughing and retching sounds now.

  “Okay,” he said, when he was halfway across the room. “I’m going to have to start treading water now. Or not water. Whatever this stuff actually is.”

  He paused, adjusted his angle, and moved forward again. He kept the hand holding the pack aloft. He dropped the other into the liquid and started walking. After a few moments it became clear from the movements of his head that his feet were no longer touching the bottom, and he was treading water, using his hand as a paddle to laboriously pull forward.

  It was very slow, the liquid still thick enough to make progress tough.

  “Are we even going to be able to do this?” Molly asked me. “I’ve got swim game, but that looks hard.”

  “We’ll be fine,” I said. There was nothing else to say. I heard Ken breathe out heavily behind me, however, and knew what he’d be thinking. That he was not light, or fit, and it was going to be extremely challenging for Pierre to swim for both of them. “We’ll be fine,” I said again.

  We watched Pierre slowly progress toward the end of the room, Molly holding the beam of the camera light steady, until his head and arm became the only things we could see. At one point he seemed to lose rhythm, and his head sank closer to the surface, but he recovered and kept going.

  Then there was a grunting sound as he wrenched his right arm out of the liquid.

  “There,” he said. He sounded a long distance away—much farther than the length of the room. There was a thud as his backpack landed in the fissure. “Done it.”

  “Good work. Take a minute before you come back.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said. He was panting hard, and sounded exhausted. “I’ll be doing that, trust me.”

  And then there was a really bad, loud sound, from the direction of the main room.

  The three of us jumped and swung around in that direction, Molly unthinkingly bringing the beam of light with her.

  For a fraction of a second I saw something, only about thirty yards away up the corridor.

  A shape, momentarily lit. Not as tall as a man, only five feet high, but twice human breadth. Muscled like an ox. Hands like spades, totally out of proportion, spatulate fingers red with Gemma’s blood.

  A huge, bald head, thick with bone.

  By the time Molly whipped the beam across where it had been, the creature had slipped back into the darkness. It hadn’t gone far, though. You could hear it breathing.

  “There’s two of them,” Ken said. “Turn off the light.”

  Molly flicked off the beam. Everyone listened.
/>
  Two things, breathing in the darkness. Heavily. As if struggling to push air in and out of noses and chests still thick with the nutrient soup they’d crawled out of.

  One made the sound again. The sound we’d been hearing. It was guttural, throaty. Over a couple of seconds, it changed in pitch three times. It wasn’t language, but it was communication of some kind. Not with us. With the other one.

  They were planning how to attack.

  “They’re coming closer,” Molly said. She sounded very unhappy and very scared.

  Swishing footfalls on the stone floor. A low, rumbling growl. Deeply buried parts of your heart, soul, and most ancient DNA know exactly what that sound means.

  Molly and I took a step back into the room.

  Another growl, louder now.

  “Go,” Ken said.

  “What?”

  “We don’t have time for Pierre to swim back for me. I’ll lead them away down the corridor.”

  “Fuck off, Ken,” I said.

  The creature nearest us made another sound. Not a growl. More like a roar. They had us cornered and they knew it. They were coming for us now.

  “You hang around and we’re all going to die. Seriously. I’m done. We’re almost out of cigarettes anyway.”

  “Don’t be a—”

  “Molly!” he shouted. “Just do it.”

  “But—”

  She didn’t want to, but she was very used to doing what Ken said and in that beat of hesitation he grabbed the camera from her with one hand and with the other shoved me, hard.

  I tripped over the lintel and fell backward into the room, winding up full-length on the floor. Ken flicked the light on, and for a moment was lit, grinning, from underneath. He winked, looking for a moment so much younger.

  “It’s been fun, mate,” he said. “Really. But you’re still a twat.”

  Then he ran away up the corridor.

  I scrambled to my feet, pushed Molly hard behind me, so she went skittering across the floor and into the liquid. Through the pitch darkness, I heard a thick, gloopy splash.

  “Go,” I shouted to her.

  “What’s happening?” Pierre called.