The Anomaly(50)

We advanced slowly, taking time to try to become accustomed to the odor. As I’d noted the day before, it didn’t start strong, which made the degree of its unpleasantness all the more surprising. It remained low, insidious, irrevocable, but got more intense as we progressed into the room. Breathing through your mouth helped a little, though not enough. After a while it seemed to coat your tongue.

“I’m ready to bail on this,” I said.

“Oh yes. Check this out before we go, though,” Molly said. Her voice was muffled because she was holding her hand over her nose and mouth. She lowered the beam of the light so that it shone on the floor.

“What?”

She moved the beam back in an arc so it illuminated the patch we’d just walked over. “Compare and contrast.”

The floor ahead was darker in color than the portion behind. The demarcation was uneven, like a tide mark. As we walked farther the effect intensified. At first it was a faint stain. Slowly it began to thicken until you couldn’t see the rock through it anymore. The color distribution was uneven, varying from dark gray to nearly pitch-black.

I squatted down and got up close, wet my finger and ran it over the surface. “It’s smooth,” I said. “And very hard. Like it’s been baked onto the rock.”

“Is that where the smell’s coming from?”

“I’m not sure. It could be.” I smelled the finger I’d run over it. “Actually, yes. I think so.”

“That’s not great news,” Ken said.

“Why?” Molly asked.

“Couple of mummified rats, maybe we’re onto something. But if it’s some nasty fossil fuel gunk that’s seeped out of the rock over the years and dried out, we’re no better off.”

“We don’t know for sure that’s what it is,” I said. “Let’s keep looking.”

We moved on, taking a diagonal course toward the right wall. The stuff on the floor continued to become thicker. The gray patches disappeared and it became unrelenting black, almost glassy.

“Look at the walls,” Ken said.

Molly redirected the light. There was discoloration there, too, but a different kind. More like smoke damage, deeply ingrained soot from an intense flame. It was also on the ceiling.

“Sorry, Nolan,” Ken said. “But I think we’re on a loser. Something burned up in here a long time ago. Whatever it burned or melted or baked onto the floor is what’s causing that smell, I reckon.”

It felt strange to be standing in a place where at some point—hundreds or thousands of years ago—there had been an intense fire and great heat. That was gone now, along with any hope of understanding what had caused it. All that remained was an unpleasant olfactory echo. And us, stuck, with no way out.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think you’re right.”

He and I waited together as Molly wandered farther into the room, taking the source of light with her. I had a headache, and it was getting worse. My stomach made a sudden and protracted growl.

“Eat some of that sandwich when we get back,” Ken said.

“I will. But when that’s gone, we’ve got a few peanuts and a couple granola bars and that’s the end of it.”

“Nolan, this is not good. And you know what’s weird about this place?”

“Seriously? How about ‘everything’?”

“True. But also, apart from those spheres in the pool room, there’s nothing here. It’s totally bare. Not even any rocks lying on the ground. Completely empty.”

“Maybe Kincaid and his crew took it all.”

“Every single thing? That’s pretty shitty archeological practice, even by the standards of the time. But my point is now this room’s turned out to be a bust, I’m wondering whether our new goal should be finding something—anything—that we can use to bang against rock.”

“Because…?”

“I don’t know how else we’re going to get out of here.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I’m not talking about hacking out a tunnel. I mean trying to make the gap around that big stone ball bigger. So that somebody slim, like Gemma, can get out.”

“It’s rock, Ken. If we had chisels and hammers and dynamite we could get somewhere. But banging a pebble against it is just going to be a waste of energy that we can’t afford.”

He opened his mouth, but closed it again. Nodded. “Yeah. I know. But…then what?”

More than anything else so far, the fact that Ken had been semiseriously talking about trying to bang a hole in the passage around the ball made me realize how screwed we were. When you’re in a bad situation there’s always part of your mind that carries blithely on, assuming you merely haven’t thought of The Thing yet—that there’s some obvious solution you simply haven’t fallen upon. Sure, it looks bad right now, this voice murmurs, comfortingly, but it won’t when you’ve come up with The Thing That Solves It All.

But what if there’s no Thing? What if the situation is actually as bad as it looks? Or worse?

“Shit, Ken,” I said. “I’m sorry I got us into this.”

“Don’t be a twat. And look, I’m only being a producer and coming up with a plan B for the sake of it. Feather will come back. And the longer she’s gone, the better.”