The Anomaly(34)

In the middle, directly in line with the main passage we’d come up, was a cube of stone, three feet to a side. This had been carved out of something other than the bedrock surrounding us. It looked harder and much more finely worked than anything we’d encountered before. It had already struck me that the small structures we kept seeing in the rooms down the side corridors—the embedded table/ledges and the randomly placed four-sided pyramids—seemed notably geometric. This took that stylization to a whole other level, and would have been remarkable even were it not for the thing sitting on top of it. It wasn’t a statue, a Buddha-like god rendering of the type Kincaid had described.

It was a sphere. Carved out of stone, utterly perfect. And about—I estimated by comparing it to Pierre, who was approaching it as he filmed—twelve feet across.

“What the actual fuck?” Ken said, staring up at the sphere as we walked around it.

“I know.”

“You seen anything like that before?”

“No. A bunch of granite balls were discovered in Costa Rica back in the 1930s. Maybe some in Bosnia a few years ago, too, though the word is those are likely concretion artifacts, natural phenomena. The Costa Rica ones seem genuine, but the biggest is under six feet high. And I don’t think any of them are this perfect.”

“So there’s nothing like this?”

“Nowhere in the world, ever. Certainly not buried over a mile underground. Propped on an equally perfect cube.”

“So this would be the money shot?”

“This is the shot of our lives, Ken.”

Molly called over from near the wall. “There’s markings here. And a doorway.”

We went over. There were indeed markings on the wall, chipped into the rock, made visible by sooty deposits. It was impossible to tell what they were supposed to represent. The doorway was six feet wide and maybe twice that tall. Beyond, utter darkness.

“Why’d they make the passages so high?” Ken said.

“No idea.”

“There’s more doorways over here,” Feather called. She and Gemma were exploring around the bottom of the room, close to the main entrance.

“Spokes of a wheel,” Molly said. “Isn’t that how Kincaid described it?”

“He did.”

“Good,” she said briskly. “So we’ve found his cave. And we’ve found that thing in the middle, too. Which is truly awesome. We rock. If you’ll excuse the pun. And so now, I’m hoping, we’re going to leave?”

Her voice sounded the way it had when it’d been just her and me in the lower passageway. Tight, overmodulated. I didn’t think it was merely claustrophobia, though, or whatever it had been about earlier. We were tired, after a few nights of patchy sleep and a lot of exertion—but it wasn’t that, either. However much you know that an archeological site is no big deal, its inexplicability a function of cultural ignorance, it has a strange atmosphere. A sense of passing and loss and things gone by. When you are far separated in time from its creators, and divorced, too, from their lives and motivations, they feel stripped of humanity—especially when total lack of ambient light means that you’re effectively there in the middle of the night.

“Yeah,” Ken said, and even he didn’t sound his usual self. “We need twenty seconds of Nolan talking in front of that big stone ball, and then we’re out of here. Nolan, make it good. Or just stand there and point. It kind of speaks for itself, mate.”

I walked with him over to the sphere, and Pierre told Ken how to hold his lamp to back up the light attached to the camera. I was aware of the others wandering around the periphery of the room, but any flickers of light from them would only add to the atmosphere. They’d all know to keep quiet.

“So,” I said, to camera. Something was supposed to come after that, but I wasn’t sure what. I started again. “As you can see, we’ve found something else. Something that makes the rooms earlier seem…less of a big deal.”

I gestured up at the sphere. Pierre slowly tilted back to take it in, then followed me as I started walking around it.

“I don’t know what type of rock this is, but it’s different from what the passages are carved out of. Different from the canyon as a whole. This looks more like granite. Something hard enough to be precisely worked and shaped. And then, somehow, they got it here.”

I stepped back a few paces. “And to make matters stranger, it’s balanced on top of a cube. Well, not ‘balanced’—you’ll see it fits neatly into a shallow depression which has been carved to hold it in position. I don’t even know how you’d start doing something like that.”

I turned from the ball and spoke straight to camera. “I’ll be honest with you, viewers. I don’t know what to say about any of this. I’ve never heard of anything like it, anywhere in the world. Kincaid said they found a big statue here. Why did he lie? I have no idea. Or, maybe, one idea. In his day people were still discovering extraordinary things about this country—the Native American mound complexes, natural features like the Devils Tower in Wyoming, vistas like Bryce Canyon. Maybe Kincaid didn’t think a stone ball would be big enough news.

“But he was wrong. That other stuff? It’s amazing, but we now know what it is, and why it’s there. The object behind me is something that conventional history has no way of explaining. This, my friends, is an honest-to-God anomaly. And you’ve been with us every step of the way. This is yours. So now we’re going to beat a graceful retreat, and hand this mystery over to the experts. Thanks for coming with us on this remarkable journey.”