The Anomaly(31)

“Annoyingly,” he said, “the twat in the billowy shirt is correct. We have not often been forced to confront the problem of actually finding something. Or ever, really. So I’m thinking on my feet. But the bottom line is we’ve already done enough to make a few headlines. Let’s make sure they’re good ones. Having said which, I’m not leaving without taking a peek down one of those side passages. We’ve earned that, I reckon. And if we trample some old dust in the process, well, sue me. Okay, Nolan?”

“Fine by me.”

“All right, team. So let’s all get back there and we’ll film Nolan going in.” He looked at me, unable to suppress a grin. “Well done, mate. I told everyone you weren’t a total loser.”

“Did they listen?”

“No. But they might now.”

He led the others back up the passage while I took another look at the sealed-up opening. Gemma lingered.

“Congrats again,” she said. “Seriously. But you got one thing wrong.”

“What’s that?”

“You said the only question was what we did next.”

“Well, it is.”

“No. I’d like to know the answer to another one.”

“Which is?”

“Why Kincaid went to so much trouble to brick this place up.”





Chapter

18



So what’s supposed to be down there?” Ken asked.

We’d gathered around the doorway on the left side of the passage, backpacks piled against the other wall. Pierre experimented with Feather and Gemma to find the best way to hold their lights so he could hope to get usable film. It wasn’t going to be easy. The darkness had an inky quality, only reluctantly yielding to the glow of a flashlight, quickly reclaiming its territory as soon as the beam moved on.

“Didn’t you read the original article?”

“Yeah. Well, some of it. Come on, Nolan, neither of us thought we were going to find the thing. I may have skimmed the later sections. And earlier sections. Okay, all of it.”

“He didn’t say much about these passages. Just that there are rooms along them.”

“Ready,” Pierre said.

“Okay,” I said, to camera. “I can assure you that we’re mindful of the respect due to this ancient site, and aware that the first thing that needs to happen is a thorough investigation by archeologists with the expertise to rigorously analyze what’s here, and place it within historical and anthropological contexts. But as regular viewers know, we’ve spent a long time seeking. Having finally found something, it’s hard not to allow ourselves a peek.”

I started into the side passage. It was narrower than the main one, but still about eight feet wide. The floor was just as flat, and the walls even more clearly worked. As soon as I entered, it bent to the right, then carried on straight.

After about ten feet I saw something in the wall. A recess, six inches deep. I ran my finger over the lower surface. Dust, again dark, like soot.

“This looks like it was designed to hold a torch or lamp,” I said. “And whoever lived here, or spent time here, would have been in constant need of artificial illumination. It’s really, really dark. There’s no natural light. Never has been. And of course there’s the question of why someone would want to live this far under the ground. Because though we got here by climbing, that’s where we are. There’s some precedent for Native American tribes living in cliffs. The Anasazi inhabited an area known as the Four Corners, where Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona meet. Other tribes referred to them as the ‘ancient people,’ and they established cliff dwellings in places like Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and Mesa Verde, Colorado. But those were constructed into existing overhangs, in large, open cave mouths. They didn’t involve forging tunnels into solid rock. Why would you go to the unfathomable effort of building a passage like this, so deep in the earth?”

After ten feet my flashlight revealed a doorway on the right-hand side. Six feet wide, again curved at the top.

“So—is this another passage?” I stood in front of the opening. “It appears not.”

I walked into the space, holding the light up in front of me. Pierre tucked in behind and shot over my shoulder, as close to my POV as he could. The others followed.

It was a room, oval, about twenty feet long. The ceiling was a little lower than in the passage we’d entered from. The floor and walls had been worked to the same standard. Both sides had three of the niches we’d seen, all empty. At the far end, off-center, was what looked like a table or plinth. A portion of the wall hadn’t been carved back to meet the curve, but instead left as a level platform three feet wide, three feet off the ground, like a cube partially embedded in the wall.

I walked around the room, holding the light up to the walls, and then down toward the floor. No markings, nothing on the ground except for more of the dark dust. Assuming the room had ever been used for something, no traces of activity remained. It felt dead.

“The plot thickens,” I said to the camera. “Clearly this room had a purpose, but it’s impossible to tell what it might have been.”

When I moved the light again I noticed something I hadn’t seen before, on the other side of the room. A portion where the floor hadn’t been leveled—where, in fact, a small and very regular four-sided pyramid shape remained, about two feet high. The sides were even. Its purpose was even harder to guess at. It was not level with the “table” on the side, nor positioned in obvious relation to it. You don’t realize how used you are to seeing symmetry in man-made structures until you’re confronted with blatant asymmetry, nor how much being a member of a culture enables you to immediately make informed guesses about something’s purpose.