The Anomaly(32)

I said something to this effect to the camera. “And that makes you all the more prone to ask ‘What the heck was it for?’ If not decoration, it must have had a function. What was it? I don’t know. Maybe an archeologist will.”

I wandered back through the room slowly, giving Pierre a chance to pick up some nonspeaking footage for intercuts, and then went back out into the corridor passage.

“Well,” I said.

Everyone remained silent, even Ken. This place did that to you. It was very heavy. Very quiet. In the outside world, real or virtual, there’s such a clamor that you feel you have to make a sound. To establish yourself as part of the crowd, make sure that you are added to the reckoning, to stick up your hand and claim the attention that proves you’re alive.

In a silence this profound you felt different. Some deep, rusty, older part of your brain urged you to remain quiet, to avoid being noticed.

“Let’s go on a little farther,” I said.



We spent the next hour exploring the passage. There were more rooms on both sides. Most about the same size, others larger, including one perhaps three times as long, in more of a lozenge shape. There were a few smaller ones, too. All but two of the rooms we entered had an example of the wide, semicuboid ledges, and most also had a small pyramid. Their location was unpredictable, and it’s not as if they could have been shoved to different places and left there by accident: they’d been hewn out of solid rock. The one thing it did remind me of was the curious unfinished chamber found under the Pyramid of Cheops. Small, low-ceilinged, divided into different levels and sections, its purpose yet to be established.

“So what’s the deal with those things?” Gemma asked me when we were in one of the larger rooms. We’d stopped filming a while back, and were exploring the passage in pairs.

“No idea,” I said. “And I don’t understand the variation in placement, either. Native American art is generally pretty formalized. Like I said the other night: There’s a way of representing something, and that’s the way it’s done. So I’m assuming these probably aren’t art, but utility structures.”

“For doing what?”

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

Ken popped his head into the room. “Nolan, come and have a look at this.”

We followed him forty feet down the passage. “Dunno if it means anything,” he said. “But it’s different.”

He led me into a room that was smaller, about ten feet across, and circular. Neither the ledge nor a pyramid structure was present, though there was a rectangular depression in the floor. I noticed the rock within it was darker than usual, and then I realized that the walls were, too.

“Looks almost like that was a fire pit,” I said. “Though…”

I raised the lamp and looked at the ceiling. No sign of a concentration of carbon material, as you might expect above a fire. And no hole. “Who’d light fires underground? The whole place would get choked with smoke in seconds.”

“What about a whatsit?” Ken said. “One of those ceremonial things.”

“A kiva,” I said. “Yeah, maybe.” Gemma was looking uncomprehending. “Some of the southwestern tribes had underground circular spaces called kivas. About this size, sometimes larger. You see them at Chaco and Mesa Verde, to which, yes, I have actually been. In real life.”

“Ha ha. What are they for?”

“Rituals, and for guys to sit around making laws and being sexist and stuff. Usually had a fire pit in the middle. Often built-in banquettes in the walls, too, which this doesn’t, but maybe it had wooden benches or something. Kivas have a hole in the ceiling, so in this one you’re still going to have a serious smoke problem, which might explain the dark dust, but…who knows.”

Ken stood, hands on hips, looking around. “Well, it’s all very much of a something,” he said. “And I think we can assume we’re hell-yes going to get another season on the back of this. But right this moment there’s a more pressing concern we need to attend to.”

“What?”

“I’m hungry.”





Chapter

19



We went back to the main passage and got out the sandwiches and water. We all stuck to Ken’s suggestion of eating only half, in case Dylan hadn’t managed to score additional food for tonight. Pierre wandered off down the opposite corridor with his sandwich and came back twenty minutes later.

“Same down there,” he said. “Same rooms, similar sizes, same pyramid things. There was a doorway that seemed like it’d been blocked with a single sheet of stone. Couldn’t move it.”

“How far’s the passage go?”

He shrugged. We didn’t know how far the other one went, either. When we’d turned around to head back for lunch, after seeing about twenty rooms, the passage was still leading out into the darkness. “Didn’t Kincaid claim there were statues and urns and hieroglyphics and stuff?”

“Yes. But not in this part.”

“So where?”

“Well, bear in mind he doesn’t even mention the shaft we came up from the fissure. But I think after about another hundred and fifty feet the main passage is supposed to open out into a large circular space. With a big statue in the middle. Then rooms full of gold urns and mummies and Lord knows what else.”