The Anomaly(27)

“I guess.”

“Come on. This would take it to another level, right? It would prove this cave was known to Native Americans at some point, and they decorated it. Archeologists will want to come look, at least. Worst case, they’ll name the damned thing after you, and that’s actually kind of cool.”

“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’ll go take a look.”

“No,” she said. “We will.”



We got out flashlights and walked to the back of the antechamber.

“You really don’t have to do this.”

“Yes, I do,” she said. “I had some issues back in the day. Anxiety. Panic attacks. Bulimia for a while.”

“Oh,” I said. “That must have been…well, pretty shitty, I would imagine.”

“It was. But it was a while ago and I did a lot of work on it and I’m fully functioning now.”

“Huh. You think you know someone, eh? Next thing you’ll be telling me you’re a Republican.”

“I am.”

“What?”

“But the point of my oversharing moment is that this ‘I’m not going down the passage’ crap cannot stand. So let’s get to it. Lead on.”

“Seriously, you vote Republican?”

“My dad’s a GOP congressman.”

“Okay then.”

We switched on the lights and walked in. With all the others still back in the main cave area, getting ready to climb back down to the river, the crevice seemed different. Extremely still and immensely quiet. Very, very ancient—of course, as it was hundreds of thousands of years old, if not more—and fundamentally inhuman. Molly’s breathing was very regular in the semidarkness, as though she was doing something in particular with it.

“Yoga?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Cool. Is it helping?”

“Actually, it’s making me light-headed. I’m going to stop it now.”

I kept a close eye on the walls as we walked farther into the fissure, hoping I’d spot something that had been missed earlier. But there was nothing. Just yard after yard of irregular, natural, uninteresting rock.

We trained our flashlights up toward the ceiling now and then, such as it was; a sharply tapering area, plagued with shadows. There was nothing to see there, either.

Then we were at the end. “Ha,” Molly said, voice a little shaky. “In your face, dark and claustrophobic tunnel. I win.”

“It doesn’t look the way it did on the phone,” I said, pointing my light straight up at the ceiling.

“There’s a lip,” she said, peering up. “About ten, twelve feet up. Take a couple steps back.”

We did, and I saw she was right. From this angle the beams showed a small recess beyond. “And there are your little outcrops,” I said. “One, two, three.”

“What do you think?”

“I don’t know. I mean, sure, they look even in distribution. Possibly. But…Okay, hold the light.”

I put a headlamp on and looked around before selecting a couple of especially ragged sections of side wall. I set my right foot on one, and used the other to pull myself up.

From this elevated position I was able to angle myself so that my back was against the end wall, and then start to inch my way up, shifting feet and hands as required.

“Wow,” she said. “It’s Spider-Man!”

“Do fuck off, Moll.”

It took five minutes of puffing and exertion to grab and yank myself up the twelve or fifteen feet until I could get a hand over the lip. I was stymied for a couple of minutes when it appeared that I was stuck, unable to get the rest of my body up, but I finally found a way to haul myself over.

“It’s about six feet deep,” I told Molly below. “Kind of narrow, less than four feet.”

“What about the outcrops? Do they look like they’ve been chiseled into shape?”

There was enough illumination from my headlamp to show straightaway that both the frozen image on the camera and our view from below had been misleading.

“They’re not outcrops,” I said. “They’re recesses.”

“Like where a stone has fallen out of softer rock?”

I moved up closer. “No,” I said. “Not unless the stones were all the same size. And…rectangular.”

I slowly tilted my head back, redirecting the beam of the headlamp and revealing that this deeper part of the recess didn’t have a ceiling, but was open above my head.

“And there’s more. Perfectly regular. Left, right, left, right. Stretching up as far as I can see. Holy crap, Moll.”

“What?”

I looked down at her. “This is a ladder.”





Part Two



The highest goal that man can achieve is amazement.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe





And the Lord regretted that

he had made man on the earth,

and it grieved him to his heart.

—Genesis 6:6





From the files of Nolan Moore:





ENGRAVING OF JOHN WESLEY POWELL’S 1869 EXPEDITION (1875)