The Anomaly(14)

It was already midafternoon and the sun was turning the jagged walls of the canyon some pretty glorious shades of red, orange, and brown. Much of this was organized in horizontal striations, but there were patches of mineral staining across it, and vertical lines, too. The lower stretches were sparsely dotted with shrubs and small, gnarled trees. Broken rocks led down to the river, about sixty feet wide at this point, and thirty feet deep. It truly felt like being on another planet.

Later I’d be doing another to-camera segment concerning our route, but I’d keep it short. Partly to maintain the air of mystery—and pay lip service to Kincaid’s circumspect description of his expedition, which genuinely did strike me as intriguing. Also because frankly I couldn’t remember why I’d decided this was where we should be looking. I’d mapped out the general area by triangulating five different articles I’d found on the web, all written with the brain-searing turgidity of people who find detail very interesting indeed. I have many fine qualities (I imagine) but a rigorous attention to detail is not one of them.

So far, so good. To complicate matters, however, I’d gone on to decide that the researchers/speculators whose work I’d been collating/stealing had missed further subtle references in the original text, which to me (under the influence, I’ll confess, of a certain amount of alcohol, along with some killer pot sold to me by the Latvian woman who cleans my apartment, which is a story I’d prefer not to get into) implied that Kincaid had been sowing a false trail. I had in my possession (in a virtual sense—I’d photographed it and kicked the pics up to my Evernote database) the huge piece of paper on which I’d sketched and calculated and diagrammed until I had my own speculative location for the cavern. It looked like the kind of thing the cops discover nailed to the garage wall of some guy they’ve just arrested on suspicion of multiple grisly homicides over a decade-long campaign of terror, but it made sense at the time. Sort of.

I had it narrowed down to a four-hundred-yard stretch of the river—an unremarkable portion of backwater up a side canyon that had attracted no interest from anyone whatsoever—where the water was both unusually wide and unusually deep.

But first, we had to get there.



After an hour of gently cruising, the raft started to go far more quickly, for no obvious reason, at first.

“Are we getting close to the rapids?”

“Ya,” Dylan said. “You all might want to hold on.”

The raft jumped another notch in speed and was whipped around a bend, and suddenly the river looked very different. Instead of an open, calm course, it had narrowed to less than a third of the previous width and was strewn with big rocks, the current varying markedly as it cut around them—but all going very fast.

Before any of us had time to get used to this we were being thrown chaotically from side to side, the raft briefly airborne, slapping back into the water with a bone-juddering thump—and then there was another huge bounce that took the right side of the raft two feet higher than the left.

And suddenly Feather wasn’t in the boat anymore.

“Shit!” Dylan shouted.

He started bellowing instructions, trying to get the raft to a calmer section toward the left side as he stared wildly around for Feather. He seemed extremely disconcerted—which didn’t help the rest of us.

“Where is she?” Molly shouted back. “Where—”

But then we saw her. Swimming alongside us, cresting the currents easily, deftly avoiding a big boulder’s attempt to flip her over, and then cutting back through the water toward the boat with strong, measured strokes.

Pierre reached a hand down and she grabbed it and was back in the raft in a moment, grinning from ear to ear.

“Again, again,” she said.

After a few more minutes of extreme bumpiness there were no more rocks. The river widened and the water slowly returned to a more normal pace. Feather looked disappointed.

“You okay?” I asked.

“Okay? That was awesome. Dylan—are there more rapids coming up today?”

“No. And look, when I say hold on tight, hold on tight. I’m here to make sure you don’t die, ya?”

I winked at Ken. “Ah well. Shame not to get the shot of me falling in that I suspect you were hoping for.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But there’s always next time. You can run, mate, but you can’t hide.”





Chapter

9



This is a bit more like it.”

It was early evening and Ken and I were sitting in rickety camp chairs on a small patch of beach, fifty yards long and half that deep, in a portion of the canyon where the wall sloped gently before shooting back up into the sky. The opposite side was sheer right down to the water, but the fading rays of the sun bounced off the rim, far, far above, hazing out the sky and setting the walls alight.

It was a heck of a view. Adding to our sense of comfort was the fact we were pretty full. In addition to the camp chairs and three tiny tents stowed on the boat—immediately allotted, without recourse to speech or discussion, to the women present: I could see Gemma considering whether this constituted gender fascism of a virulence worth resisting and deciding nuts to that, it would get cold in the night—Dylan had unpacked a portable grill. Once we’d settled in and gotten the tents up he started wielding tongs and spatula and produced skewers of lamb and chicken from a cooler, and the smell of these cooking in the pure air was enough to provoke audible noises of anticipation from people’s stomachs.