The Anomaly(6)

Will we find the cavern? I don’t know. But I do know this: In the search for truth, it matters not whether we find.

It matters only that we continue to seek.

I’d better turn in. Tomorrow the expedition starts in earnest. We’ll start by hiking down to



I stopped typing and rubbed my eyes.

The fog/smoke mixed metaphor wasn’t great. It needed a stirring final paragraph, and stardust sprinkled over it. It was hokey and below my usual standard. When you’re selling a sense of wonder, you need to feel it.

I wasn’t feeling it.

For that I needed coffee and a cigarette. The latter meant schlepping downstairs, which I decided would be a more appealing prospect if I made the coffee first and could take it with me. Let it not be said that I am incapable of long-term planning.

While I waited for the coffee to brew I corrected a few typos and then flipped over to Twitter and spent a couple of minutes replying to comments. There weren’t many, because I’d done this before heading down to the bar earlier. There hadn’t been many then, either.

But that was going to change. Right?

The coffeemaker started to cough like a consumptive dog, indicating it still had a minute left to go. This unfortunately gave me a little spare time. In it I did something I’d been determined not to.

I typed in a Twitter username.

The relevant homepage loaded quickly. I flicked down, feeling like an intruder, glimpsing tweets in her distinctive, direct style. I told myself that I had a very different audience but the fact was that Kristy was simply better at concentrating her messages down to tweetable length. Better at writing in general, if the truth be told.

The header image was different from last time I’d yielded to this impulse, a few weeks before. It showed her standing somewhere wild and cold, looking dynamic and committed—yet also down-to-earth and vulnerable.

There was a link to a recent blog post on her main site, from two days back. I couldn’t face reading it, but cached the post to my phone for later, or more likely never.

I flicked back to her Twitter homepage and looked at the most recent pictures in the timeline. They were also of somewhere cold. The accompanying tweets doubtless explained where she was, and why, but I didn’t read them.

I didn’t need to know.



I took my coffee downstairs and stood in an especially uninteresting section of the parking lot. As a smoker you often get to see the backs of places, parts other people don’t notice, the secrets hidden in plain sight. I once tried convincing Ken this was kind of a metaphor for The Anomaly Files, but he just stared at me for a while and then walked away.

It was very cold now, and it occurred to me that a smarter guy would have brought along a thicker sweater for the night we’d be spending in the canyon. Too late. I wish I were that guy. It must be great being him.

Halfway through the smoke I realized I could hear voices, low tones in what was otherwise silence. Sounded like a man and a woman, around the corner. She was doing most of the talking. I couldn’t make out the words but the cadences sounded familiar.

It struck me that it might be the receptionist I’d encountered when we checked in. I regarded that as an unsuccessful human interaction, and I’d had enough to drink over the course of the evening that it seemed like a good idea to stroll around the corner and be affable at her.

As I walked in their direction, however, the voices suddenly stopped, as if they’d heard me coming. There was silence for a moment, then two sets of footsteps, rapidly receding.

By the time I’d turned the corner there was no one there. No telltale smell of smoke, either, or butts on the ground. Some minor hotel-based intrigue, most likely, and none of my business. It still left me feeling vaguely rejected and alone.

I went back upstairs, fixed my post, and submitted it. Then I went to bed and listened to the air conditioner until I eventually fell asleep.





Chapter

4



Very early the next morning Ken strolled pugnaciously out of the hotel lobby, steaming cardboard cup in hand.

“Fuck are you looking so smug about?” he said.

I’d been there ten minutes, long enough to discover that a desert lot at 5:45 a.m. is no warmer than it is at midnight. “It’s not smugness,” I said. “I can’t move my face.”

“Bollocks. This time of day you normally look like you’ve been exhumed. By an amateur. But this morning it’s like you think you’ve discovered a reason to keep on living. Which is an illusion, incidentally. Heed the tiny demons and their wheedling voices. End it all.”

“Ken, I’m not killing myself so you can claim the insurance. We’ve discussed this.”

“Never been a team player, have you, mate.”

“I guess not.”

“Seriously, Nolan. Spill it.”

I’d been intending to keep it quiet but he clearly wasn’t going to let it go. “Got an email.”

“From?”

“The publisher.”

Ken raised an eyebrow. “‘The’?”

“My.”

He grinned like a kid and cuffed me on the shoulder, hard enough to spill half the coffee out of my cup. “Fucking fantastic, mate. Top news.”

It actually kind of was. The two books I’d produced in the last year—accounts of Anomaly Files investigations, featuring stills from the show along with archive photographs—had been self-published, cobbled together by yours truly and thus looking like they’d been assembled by a reasonably talented sixth-grader. The email that had arrived before I came downstairs confirmed both were being acquired by a real-life publishing house and would be coming (fairly) soon to a bookstore near you.