The Anomaly(51)

“How do you figure that?”

“Because it implies she’s hooked up with Dylan and gone with him to get help. Yesterday she was only gone a few hours, right? Because he wasn’t there, and so she came back. If she’s not back in a couple hours it’s because it’s all in hand and stuff’s happening. Or that’s what I’m telling myself.”

“Is it working?”

“Fuck off. By the way—are you aware you keep scratching the back of your neck?”

“What?”

He pointed at my hand—and only then did I realize that yes, I was scratching there again. And had been for a while.

“You were doing it on your arm earlier, too. I’ve seen Molly scratching as well.”

“I feel kinda itchy. Probably dried sweat.”

“Except you’ve had two swims in that pool. In fact, you and Molly were the only ones who had one in the night, right? When the water looked cloudy, according to you. And now you and her are the people scratching like cats with fleas.”

“What are you saying?”

“Just pointing out a correlation, mate.”

I wasn’t at all sure what he was getting at. My headache was getting steadily worse, and my mouth felt very dry.

“Hey, guys,” Molly called. She sounded a long way away. “There’s an opening back here.”





Chapter

30



The room was deeper than I’d realized, and it was twenty yards before we got to Molly. The back wall hadn’t been shaped and smoothed and right-angled like the others, and looked like a remnant of an originally natural space, a cavern deep underground. In the middle was an opening. It, too, looked natural, a crack in the rock, tapering sharply at the top and bottom and about two, three feet wide in the middle.

Molly shone the light directly into it, revealing a rough, slanting, and narrow passage beyond.

“Now we’re talking,” Ken said.

“Should we tell the others before we check it out?”

“No,” I said. “We’re here now. And we need someone holding the fort back there for when Feather gets back. If it looks like this is going a significant distance, someone can go fetch them. Bummer we didn’t bring a headlamp, though.”

Molly handed me the light. I stepped up into the “passage,” which in reality—this became clear when you got into it—was a very ragged fissure. Despite the hundreds of thousands of man-hours spent chiseling and shaping nearby, it seemed like nobody had done anything to this part.

“It gets kind of tight up ahead,” I said.

“What are you implying?” Ken asked.

“Nothing, you ass. Just I’m wondering why they never worked it, made it like the other passages.”

“Is it possible it happened after this place was built? Earthquake damage?”

“Maybe. I’m not a geologist. But I’m thinking not, because the end wall was uneven, too. It’s more as though this thing was already here when they built the rest of it, and they decided to preserve its natural state for some reason.”

I moved along the fissure, carefully. The floor was very uneven and had cracks big enough to twist your ankle in. Once I was a few feet down Ken followed, with Molly at the back.

After a while the crack jagged to the left, and got narrower. Narrow enough, in fact, that we had to move sideways along it. And then stoop.

“Are we even sure this is going anywhere?” Molly’s voice was tight. “By which I mean anywhere we want to be?”

After another twenty feet I stopped. The top of the crevice was getting lower and lower, though thankfully the smell had abated. “We’re nearly going to have to crawl through this next part,” I said. “If anybody wants to bail…this is probably the moment.”

“Just keep going,” Ken said.

I hung the light around my neck and lowered to a crouch. Took a deep breath. I don’t have a particular problem with confined spaces, but this was very confined indeed. A low, insistent voice in the back of my mind wasn’t happy, and was toying with the idea of panicking. If Molly managed to make it through this section, she was a hell of a lot braver than me. Assuming this wasn’t merely the beginning of the end of the fissure, of course, the point where it dwindled to nothing. The light wasn’t showing far enough to tell.

We kept going. I thought there was a slight upward trajectory, though not one that would make a difference. A matter of degrees. To get to the surface at this incline would take several hundred miles. I moved one foot forward, bracing against the walls to the side and above my head, then shifted the other foot after it. Repeat.

It was very slow and tiring, the space thick with the sound of our panting and grunts of exertion. The only upside was that we were now out of range of the smell from the room. The crevice smelled like dust, and was like being in a coffin made of rock.

We progressed like this for ten minutes. I was close to giving up but then there was space over my head again. Room to move my elbows, too.

This caught me by surprise and for another yard or so I continued to shuffle, crabbed down in a crouch. Then I straightened, cautiously.

“Are we there yet?” Ken’s voice was muffled.

“I don’t know. But you can stand up, at least.”