The Anomaly(25)

And it was dark. Doesn’t matter how old you get or how much creeping around you’ve done in cemeteries or abandoned insane asylums and other places of self-evident spookiness in pursuit of halfway-watchable online viewing; the dark is the dark is the dark.

“Kincaid mentioned a passage,” I said. “And he said it was around twelve feet wide. This is narrower. The walls are uneven. There’s a strong taper toward the top. The floor is bumpy and slopes a little. This could just be a natural fissure. We’re not going to know until we come to the next detail in the account. Kincaid said that fifty-seven feet along a passage from the entrance, he and the other explorers came upon a doorway. That was the gateway to all the strange stuff. So let’s go look.”

“Or not,” Molly said.

“What?”

“Nolan, I don’t like this.”

Pierre lowered the camera. His face said he was thinking the same as me—that the last person you’d expect to get the jitters was Molly.

“Moll,” I said, “it’s just a crevice at this stage. I don’t even know if it’s an actual passage.”

“I don’t like it,” she said stubbornly.

“Okay,” I said. “And I respect that. But we’re going to head down there anyway, right?”

“I don’t want to.”

“But…” I didn’t know what to say.

She stood looking at me, lips pursed. It’s funny how, as you get used to being with people, you stop seeing them. You assign them a role and see that instead. Molly had become Moll, to me—fearless scourge of hotel clerks and rental companies, solid and dependable, the person who made everything happen, who fixed the world when things went awry. The mom of the team. Because of this I think part of me had even assigned her a greater age than mine. Moms are older than you. It’s the law.

Now I looked at her properly—hair stuck with perspiration to a forehead still angry from yesterday’s sun—and remembered that she was fifteen years my junior. And that she was at least nervous, maybe scared, and really didn’t want to do this.

“Sure,” I said. “That’s fine. Of course.”

“I could carry the microphone thing instead, if you wanted,” Feather said diffidently.

“That’d be great,” I said. “And you know what? This is actually great. Duh. We should have thought of it before. Moll—can you stay here, film us heading up the passage? A little bit of phone-quality coverage would be great to use as a teaser on the blog.”

“Sure,” she said quietly, handing the boom to Feather. “I’m sorry, Nolan. Really. I know I’m being dumb about this.”

“Yeah…or else you’re the only one of us who doesn’t get eaten by the huge monster. Time will tell, right?”

She laughed, and it was okay.

Feather held up the mike. Molly headed back toward the opening, phone out, ready to film us heading into the gloom, and Pierre got the camera in position again.

“So let’s do it,” I said.



We walked down the passage, Gemma shining her flashlight low to make it easier to traverse the increasingly uneven “floor,” Ken now holding Feather’s light to point the way. He counted his steps, too, putting one foot directly in front of the other to yield a rough indication of the distance in feet. The passage soon started to narrow, and by forty feet in, it had reduced to the point where I could almost touch both sides at once.

The walls began to taper in more markedly above us, too, disappearing into blackness. I was careful to inspect both walls as we passed. They were very ragged, and did not look like they had been worked or refined at any point. There were no openings on either side.

At about 140 feet into the rock, the passage simply stopped, dead-ending in a slanting wall. This did not look like a designed feature, either. It merely looked like the end of the road.

“We must have missed it,” Feather said hopefully.

We trouped all the way back to the antechamber, then turned around and headed in again, more slowly, this time using all available lights to focus on the walls.

There was no doorway.

The passage led nowhere.





Chapter

15



You found the cavern, Nolan. Or a cavern. That’s something.”

Ken and I were sitting near the opening. The vista outside was still beautiful, but I wasn’t seeing it.

“Yeah,” I said. “‘Something’ is precisely what it is. ‘Some thing.’ And not a very interesting thing, at that.”

“Don’t be a twat, Nolan. It proves—”

“It proves shit, Ken. We found a natural feature. It wasn’t where Kincaid said it would be, and it’s nothing like he said it was. For all we know this thing’s already logged and the only reason it’s not on all the maps is that it’s a tedious fucking cave that isn’t worth the effort of the climb.”

“It is what it is. Or what we spin it as.”

“Which is what? Can we even get a show out of this?”

“Dunno. Worst case, we can throw it into a ‘the ones that got away’ bucket show midseason. Or stitch it into a roundup of things you’ve proved don’t exist. You know I think that would help with the haters. ‘The Anomaly Files—Your Dispassionate Seekers After Truth.’”