The Anomaly(52)

“Thank Christ for that.”

I held the light so he could see his way as he scrambled from the fissure, like an ungainly and bad-tempered champagne cork. He was red in the face and sweaty. Molly emerged a minute later with a little more grace but didn’t look like she’d enjoyed the experience even a little bit.

“Okay,” Ken said. “You may now turn and reveal the express elevator full of beer, which the temple-builders of antiquity thoughtfully installed for our convenience.”

I turned and directed the light into the inky darkness.



We were in a long space, maybe fifteen feet wide. The sloping ceiling was a couple of yards above our heads. The floor was still uneven but looked like it had been given at least some attention to level it out a little. It was impossible to tell how far the cavern went, because the light wasn’t strong enough to penetrate more than twenty feet.

The wall on the right was rough, natural. On the left it was smooth and flat—but it was hard to tell whether it had originally been that way. And within a moment of turning your attention to it, you didn’t care.

“Fuck…me,” Ken said.

This wall was covered in paintings.

They started almost immediately after the fissure widened into this bigger space. They were large, each a couple of feet tall, and rendered in a loose style. Some had been minimally shaded and filled in, but most were confined to simple flowing lines evoking shape and movement, like sketches.

I couldn’t tell what the first was supposed to be, but the second looked a lot like a bird, or perhaps an insect, as it seemed to have more than two legs—though it was hard to be sure because of the degree of stylization.

Then there was something that looked like a condor or eagle, though the head was oddly shaped. The next was a rodent or other small mammal.

And they kept on going. There were lines in what looked like charcoal, others that were white, like a chalk. Completely protected from the elements and the sun, they were as bright and strong as the day they’d been put there.

I turned and redirected the light, slowly revealing a line of more paintings stretching into the darkness. If you’d come upon this in a cave in France or Germany you would have no doubt what you were seeing. The resemblance to the kind of work that had been discovered in the caves of Lascaux—paintings made nearly twenty thousand years ago—was striking and undeniable.

We stood staring at it for several minutes. I honestly didn’t know what to say. Ken, naturally, did.

“Nolan, this is Neanderthal. And I mean that in a good way.”

“Not Neanderthal. Upper Paleolithic. But it can’t be. That era of Homo sapiens were never in North America, or barely. Certainly not the cave-painting kind.”

“Says who?”

“Literally everyone. Even the woo-woo crowd doesn’t go there. There’s never been the slightest evidence.”

“Well, not until we just found a huge great wall of Neolithic cave paintings.”

“Kincaid never made it this far?” Molly said.

“No,” I said. “They bailed at the beginning of the room that smells bad.”

“This is immense,” Ken said. “We are in new and uncharted territory, Nolan. The first white people ever to see this. Maybe the first people since the stone age. This rewrites the entire history of fucking everything. You know it does.”

“Yeah,” Molly said, her pretty, open face tilted back to look up at the pictures. “It’s going to be a bummer if we end up dying without being able to tell anyone.”

Ken and I turned to stare at her.

“Sorry,” she muttered.



We progressed along the line of paintings, looking at each in turn. They got rougher and more hurried as the line progressed, as though this project hadn’t been finished, or the artist or artists had run out of time. There were further birds, bison, a fish, something that looked like a big cat with long teeth, a spiderlike creature with legs that were wavy and all pointing in the same direction. Others were harder to identify. Maybe a wolf. A mammoth, possibly. Something like a species of antelope, but on its rear legs, the front ones much shorter than the back.

“Nolan,” Molly said. “Check that one out.”

At first glance it looked like another kind of deer, though much bulkier, again portrayed either up on hind legs or frozen in midleap. When I moved the light, however, I got what she was getting at. It clearly wasn’t a deer, when you looked properly. It was bulky and powerful across the back. Its head was bulbous and very large.

“Looks like one of the things on that Newspaper Rock in Utah you were telling Gemma about.”

“It does. Which makes this further proof of the idea of the Hopi braves making pilgrimages here. And also maybe that they’d been happening for…a really, really long time.”

“And what’s after it,” Ken said. “What’s that about?”

There was no picture to the right of the bear-like creature, at least not in the sense we’d become accustomed to. Instead there was a patch of black, ochre, and white handprints. Most were left hands, suggesting the painters were right-handed, but I saw one right hand, too.

“Humans,” I said. “All the animals were illustrated. But when it came to humankind, they made handprints instead. Maybe like a signature. To say ‘We’re different. We’re the animal that paints, instead of being painted. And we made this stuff, and this place.’ The question is—how long ago?”