The Anomaly(35)

I winked, to show I was done, and stepped back from the sphere. Pierre lowered the camera.

“Good enough,” Ken said. “So now let’s—”

“Hey, guys.” This was Gemma, calling from the darkness on the far side of the room. “Before we go, you should come see this. There’s a—”

The grinding noise was not loud.

It came from under the floor, but was such a deep tone that it was hard to tell from which direction. It was a gentle sound, and wouldn’t have been at all unnerving except for the fact that the room was so quiet.

Then, suddenly, the cube disappeared, dropping through a neat square hole that had appeared beneath it. It didn’t plummet, but descended at a measured rate, until the top was flush with the floor.

This was so very surprising that there was a one-second delay before I processed the inevitable consequence.

The stone ball descended, too, landing on the ground with a crash.

Then the ball started to roll.

“Everyone—get out of the way!”

Pierre threw himself to the side. Ken and I backed hurriedly away. I knew Gemma was out of range on the far side and Molly’s squawk confirmed she was well clear, too.

But then I saw Feather.

She was down near the entrance from the main passage, frozen in place, eyes wide, staring at the ball as it came toward her, unable to comprehend what was happening.

“Feather!” I shouted. “Move!”

The ball was gathering speed, rolling down the indentation of the path, and still she appeared rooted to the spot. I started to run, but I was on the wrong side to get around to her and I knew all I could do was keep shouting in the hope that I’d break through to her.

Finally her eyes snapped back to awareness.

She moved. But she darted the wrong way.

Instead of getting out of the path of the ball, she seemed to get confused, or…I don’t know what went through her head, and unless you’ve stood in the path of a massive stone ball rolling toward you like a movie come horribly to life, you don’t realize how the mind and body can part company, explode in an instant into a level of fear where it’s impossible to make rational choices, or any decision at all.

Ken and I shouted at her, and she realized what she’d done. But by then the ball was nearly upon her and so she started backing away from it instead—and then turned and ran down the passage, the only way she could go.

The ball rolled right into it.

Ken and I ran after but by now the ball was going so fast we couldn’t keep up. We were shouting and screaming at Feather but I can’t tell you what we were trying to say.

There was a crunching impact that nearly knocked us off our feet. At first I couldn’t work out why the ball had stopped but then I remembered the passage had gotten wider as we’d walked up it, about the point where the slope had kicked in—a slope I now realized was not an error, or architectural conceit, but there to cause the ball to roll.

The impact reverberated through the earth like a tremor, and then everything was quiet.





Chapter

21



Two seconds later, a cacophony of people yelling and screaming and running. Only Ken and I had been in a position to clearly see what had happened—the others blindsided by the ball, or too far back in shadow. Everyone was screaming at everybody else, all at the same time, trying to check if people were okay, and gradually—once they realized her voice wasn’t among those echoing in the tunnel—specifically shouting for Feather.

Ken was the first to rein the chaos back into actual words. “What the fuck?” he bellowed. “What the fuck?”

I had nothing. I was standing blinking at the stone ball. It was extremely hard to process what had occurred, not least because it seemed ridiculous, too absurdly Indiana Jones to have happened in front of our eyes. My mind kept ricocheting between a conviction that it had only been a seen-it-all-before special effect—and a horrified awareness that no, it had just actually happened in real life.

I finally got stuck between the two in a state of momentary calm, or indecision about how exactly to freak out. I turned from the ball and in the flickering and swirling of flashlights was able to run a quick internal roster and establish that everyone else was here, in the passage, and they all seemed okay. Physically, at least.

I shouted for quiet. It took ten seconds to get through to everyone. Then there was silence.

I held up my hand to keep it that way. And after a few seconds, we heard something.

“Nolan? Ken?” It was Feather’s voice.

“Feather—are you okay?”

“Yes, I’m okay,” she said. Her voice sounded shaky but clear, and surprisingly close. Though the stone ball fit snugly in the passage it had rolled down—the concave walls making terrible sense now, too—the point where the tunnel narrowed had square corners, meaning the ball didn’t plug it like a cork in a bottle. “Are you all okay?”

“We’re fine,” I said. “Well, unharmed. Are you okay?” I was dimly aware I’d asked this before. Once didn’t seem enough.

“I fell down,” she said. “I scraped my leg. And face, I think. But…basically I’m okay.”

“Have you got a light with you?”

“Yes—a headlamp. Though it’s a bit weak.”