The Anomaly(24)

Then I had a hand on the lip of the opening. I carefully pulled myself up, and a minute later, I was inside.





From the files of Nolan Moore:





THE CANYON





Chapter

14



The opening was an irregular gash in the wall about four feet wide and five tall, with a pile of rock inside. It was immediately clear that what lay past them was more than a mere recess. Daylight illuminated about twenty feet of cave depth—with the suggestion of more beyond—and the same width. I stayed on hands and knees, turned, and stuck my head out.

After withstanding an intense moment of vertigo at the sight of the drop, I called down, “Get up here.”

“Is it a cavern?”

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

“How deep?”

“Can’t see yet. But there’s plenty of room.”

I moved back and waited. They arrived, one by one: Ken first, then Gemma, Molly, Feather, and finally Pierre. I stood back with Ken while the others came up, looking at the walls beyond the opening. They were rough, variable in color—rock of the type we’d been climbing. At the back was a further gap, narrower, but wide enough for two to walk abreast.

“This it?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“What are those piles of rocks doing there?”

“Don’t know that, either.”

“Excellent. Glad you’re on top of everything. When Pierre’s got his breath, we need some film. And check this out.” He ran his hand along a section of the side wall. “Look kind of like chisel marks, don’t they?”

“A little.”

“Which Kincaid mentioned, yes?”

“He did.”

“Fuck me, Nolan. This could actually be the thing.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

Pierre eventually scrabbled up into the space, and had his camera in position quickly. Molly put the boom mike together and the others moved out of the shot, squeezing up against the walls.

“It’s been quite a climb,” I said to camera, when Molly was ready. “And it wouldn’t have happened without the team here. Pierre—pan around.”

Pierre looked confused at my breaking the fourth wall, but I gestured at him to do it.

“Molly, Feather, Gemma. And this guy, Ken. Actually I have no idea who he is, but he’s here. And the only reason we’re here at all is our cameraman Pierre, who spotted the opening, said we could do it, and showed us how. So. Thank you, Pierre.”

I noticed Gemma watching this with an odd expression, but carried on. I walked back toward the opening, indicating that Pierre should show how far up we were.

“We’re three hundred feet up the wall. Pretty high, but nowhere near the altitude Kincaid mentioned in the Phoenix piece. That could indicate we’re dead wrong, and this is a different feature that nobody happens to have noticed. But I’ve talked before about the idea that Kincaid changed some of the details. He couldn’t help but reveal the cavern’s existence. It’s kind of a big deal. Though maybe he wanted to control the information and keep the place safe from prying eyes. I don’t know. But it’s intriguing. It’s all…very intriguing.”

I dusted off my hands. “And so I guess now we take a look at what we’ve found.”



Pierre stopped filming while we got headlamps out of backpacks and Ken and I smoked. Then we organized ourselves into a line with Molly right behind me with the boom mike, Feather and Gemma armed with flashlights to direct at anything that drew my attention, and Pierre free to move around me.

I walked into the cavern.

Within a few feet it already felt cooler, but also stuffy. The ceiling was about three feet above my head. There was a dry, dusty odor, the smell of time and old rock. Now that we had light on the space, I could see it was closer to thirty feet wide, and perhaps the same deep. The walls on both sides were a little concave, top to bottom and front to back. The rocky floor was far from even. It was hard to believe the space was wholly a result of natural forces, but I didn’t know enough about geology to be sure.

“We’ve already noticed these,” I said, indicating the portion that Ken had pointed out earlier. “What could be chisel marks—suggesting a natural feature was enlarged and shaped by human hand. I’d want a field archeologist to pronounce before I went there. The shape of the walls…it looks like people widened it. But natural forces can produce things that look man-made—underwater features like the so-called Bimini Road in the Bahamas, and the Yonaguni Monument off Japan. So all I’m saying is…that’s the way it looks.”

I walked in a slow circle, illuminating the walls with my headlamp. “I don’t see anything else of note. There’s no symbols or carvings. If this place is indeed what we hope, then this area seems to be a kind of antechamber. Undecorated, utilitarian.”

I ended with the light on an opening at the end. “The aperture at the back of the cave is about six feet wide. Looks pretty rough from out here, like a natural fissure, tapering sharply toward the top. Let’s go have a closer look.”

I stepped into the passage.

I was aware of…a reluctance. Nothing major. Not a big don’t for God’s sake go in there siren. Merely a note of caution, spiraling up from the deep back brain, a little like the feeling I’d had while sitting alone early the previous morning. I was, after all, going where—so far as I knew—no man or woman had boldly gone in a damned long time. And we were a very significant distance underground. There was a heck of a lot of rock over my head, and no way of telling how stable this portion was, or where it led.