The Anomaly(40)

I had in mind to make it over to the opposite wall, but then something else caught my eye.

“Nolan,” Gemma said, “maybe you should come back now?”

“In a minute.”

I changed direction and waded straight toward the end of the room. I’d been assuming the pool would stop at a wall there, too, but soon saw this wasn’t the case. Instead there was a lip about the same height above the water as it had been at the entrance, and an open area beyond.

I sloshed up to the edge of this and stood looking for a full minute—silent long enough for Ken to call out.

“You okay?”

“You might want to come see this,” I said.



By the time they’d made it across I’d hoisted myself up out of the water and was sitting on the edge. I shone my light so they could see where they were going. Gemma moved quickly and confidently, still regarding the water with great suspicion. Ken looked sufficiently ridiculous as he doggedly waded toward me out of the gloom that I couldn’t help laughing.

“Fuck’s up with you?”

“No longer shall I use the expression ‘a duck out of water.’ Going forward, I shall think of ‘a Ken in water.’”

“Fair enough, mate. Much as I have abandoned use of the term ‘wanker,’ because I’ve found saying ‘a total Nolan’ does the same job.”

Gemma ignored us, staring at what I’d already seen on the platform beyond. She put her elbows up on the edge and scrabbled out, then turned to help me with Ken.

We stood together and looked. “Okay. This is just taking the piss now,” Ken said, as if personally affronted.

The ledge, platform, was thirty feet wide and ten deep. It sloped a little, a few inches higher at the back than the front. In the perfect center of the space was a standing stone. That’s what it looked like, anyway—the kind of thing you see in tilting rings in Europe, or at the edges of Stonehenge. A lump of hard, old rock, maybe four feet tall and two wide.

All around it, arrayed in three neat rows, were cubes of rock. Ten behind the standing stone, ten in front, eight in a row that included it as the centerpiece. Twenty-eight perfect cubes. But that wasn’t the end of it.

On each of these stood a sphere. They were different sizes, ranging from about six inches in diameter to three feet, and each was subtly different in color.

“What is this stuff? Metal?”

“Looks like it. Or minerals.” The sphere in the middle at the front looked a lot like copper. One a couple of cubes away could have been iron. The others were various types of ore. One was a cloudy, translucent shade.

As we wandered among the spheres I spotted another at the back, previously hidden in shadow. This was much larger, perhaps five feet in diameter, and stood in a depression on the floor rather than on a cube. It was very dark, almost black, with a matte surface. Like the smaller examples it looked like it had been stamped out of a mold, or poured into one.

Ken appeared next to me. “So what’s all this?”

“I have no idea,” I said. “Some kind of ritual pantheon thing, maybe—one representing each of the key gods. Or a stylized model of the solar system, complete with comets. Someone’s rock collection. I don’t know.”

“Look at this.”

Gemma was standing at the stone in the middle. The top of it had been smoothed off, leaving a surface that looked as though it had been sliced with a sharp knife. The resulting plane was smooth and polished. Into it had been carved more of the hieroglyphics we’d seen along the corridor. This time they were arrayed in a neat grid, ten by ten.

“There’s a hundred,” Ken said. “Does that mean anything?”

“Not to me. I should know whether the local tribes worked a decimal system, but I don’t. I mean, we’ve got ten fingers and ten toes, so it’s possible. But this is something else for the smart boys and girls to figure out.”

This time it was Gemma who ran her fingers over the carvings, as if they were an ancient form of Braille, waiting to reveal their secrets. I noticed she’d managed to scrape the cut on her arm again when lowering herself into the pool, and it was bleeding freely.

“When we get back to the main room,” I said, “see if Molly’s got a first aid kit in her backpack. That’s not going to heal if you keep scraping it.”

“Yes, Dad.”

“I’m just saying.”

We stood looking impotently at the pictograms. They were extremely neat, far more precise than the ones we’d seen on the walls of the passage approaching the pool and in the previous room. About half an inch square, each an intricate combination of symbols, some of which appeared in more than one pictogram. Presumably it worked on a similar principle to Egyptian or Chinese, each of the component glyphs being picto-or ideographs representing constituent things or ideas, but to get anywhere with interpreting the overall designs you’d need to understand the meaning of the component parts. One looked like the short curved horns on a dung beetle; another could have been a big hill, a pair of eagle wings, or an evocation of a welcome breeze on a summer afternoon, for all I knew. The pile of things I didn’t know or didn’t understand about this place was now so high that I wasn’t tall enough to keep adding more to the top. I was also tired and very thirsty.

“We should get back,” I said. “The others are going to be wondering where we are.”