The Anomaly(38)

“Fine,” Gemma said. “But I’m going first.”

“Bollocks you are,” Ken said.

“Why? Because I’m a woman?”

“Since you ask, yes. And you can report me to social media all you fucking like.”

“Have you forgotten who got us stuck in here?”

“That was an accident,” I said.

“My accident. I did it. And right now, I’m doing this.”

She snatched the light and stepped into the passage. Like me, she stayed motionless for a few seconds. Then took a careful step onward. She bent at the waist, looking carefully at the floor, directing the light in a slow sweep from side to side. Then took another step, doing the same. And then another.

“How’s it look?”

“Just like rock. I’m going to keep going.”

“Be careful.”

“Thanks, Nolan. Otherwise I’d have started jumping up and down.”

She was methodical. She didn’t, as I might have done, lose patience with the process and start speeding up. She diligently kept her pace slow and consistent, one step at a time. Ken and I stood meanwhile with heads cocked, one ear toward the passage. Neither of us heard anything untoward.

“There’s a doorway here,” she said. She was about thirty feet up the passage now.

“What’s it look like?”

“A dark and scary-ass doorway. I’ll keep going.”

And farther she went, until the glow from her lamp was a bare flicker in the blackness, saying little as she walked but for a mention that she’d seen another doorway, on the other side, and then another.

She went far enough, in fact, that I started to notice something about the light. I took a step into the passage myself. I walked ten feet along, against Ken’s foul-mouthed protestations, and got out my phone.

“I thought that was supposed to be turned off,” he said.

“I forgot. I’ll do it in a minute.”

I found the app I’d been thinking of and loaded it, then laid my iPhone on the floor. Gemma came back toward us, still keeping her light pointed at the ground but now walking at a normal pace. “What are you doing?”

“It’s a spirit level. Look.”

We all squatted down around it. “There’s a slight tilt downward as it leads away from the main room. Same as the main passage, in fact. Maybe not quite as much.”

“And you think that proves nothing’s going to come rolling this way and squish us like bugs?”

“Doesn’t prove it, no. It could slope in the other direction, way down there, like a parabola, and there’s probably someone smart enough to say what the angle and distances would need to be depending on the size and weight of a hypothetical stone ball, but it sure as hell isn’t me. I’m just suggesting that the downward slope makes it a little less likely that we need to worry.”

We straightened up. Looked at each other. And started walking together, very carefully, down the passage.



We weren’t measuring but I’d say it was about a hundred and fifty yards long. At the end it stopped in a wall: flat, neatly worked, final. I hadn’t really been expecting a set of stairs with an illuminated EXIT sign, but it was still extremely disappointing.

“One down, seven to go,” Ken muttered.

“We passed a bunch of doors on the way,” Gemma said. “You never know—could be something leads off one of them.”

“Maybe,” I said. “It’s worth looking. And make sure we keep checking the ceiling of the passage on the way back, too. That’s how Molly spotted the entrance to the shaft.”

“Yeah,” Ken said. “Not feeling quite so proud of her for that now, if I’m honest.”

“But that’s how you found this place,” Gemma said. “Okay, being trapped here for a while is sub-awesome, but it’s still good, isn’t it?”

“Ask me again when I’ve got a pint in one hand and a large piece of food in the other.”

So we walked back up the passage, Gemma shining her light at the ceiling, revealing only a smooth, consistent arch.

The first room we encountered was on the left. It was different from ones we’d previously seen, in that it was sternly oblong, walls, floors and ceilings meeting at right angles. It was about twenty feet long and ten wide and high and completely empty. The floor was thick with the dark dust we’d seen in other places. The end wall was entirely covered, floor to ceiling and wall to wall, by symbols neatly chiseled into the rock.

I hesitate to call them hieroglyphics. I’d be lying if I pretended to be fluent or even competent in that writing system, but I’ve spent enough time looking at photographs to be able to dependably recognize it. There was a superficial resemblance, in that some of the symbols looked as though they could represent real-life objects—corn, a mountain, a river—and groups of them were neatly arranged so as to suggest they had an aggregated meaning. But there the similarity stopped, and despite the pictograms dotted along the lines, to me it actually looked more like some kind of cuneiform.

“We’re waiting,” Gemma said.

“Huh?”

She looked at me, eyebrow raised. “This is the moment where you trace your finger over those symbols and—at first haltingly, and then with increasing breathless fluency—tell us exactly what it all says.”