The Anomaly(76)

Why?

And why did some of the figures on Newspaper Rock strongly resemble the paintings we’d discovered in the adjunct to this complex—pictures that Feather claimed were fifty thousand years old? I had no proof that her information was trustworthy. But I had no proof to the contrary, and I’d spent enough time looking at reproductions of Neolithic cave art to believe they seemed convincing. Not least because the Lascaux paintings hadn’t even been discovered until 1940—thirty years after Kincaid found this cavern, which had never been entered since.

Neither he nor anybody else would have known what to fake. Which meant they had to be real.

What I didn’t understand was why the Palinhem Foundation would want to locate a place like this. It wasn’t out of intellectual interest, that’s for sure. Feather had sounded triumphant, evangelical. Then I saw the last document she’d looked at.

The Hopi Prophecies.

An ancient list of nine signs that were supposed to portend the ending of the Fourth World, in preparation for Armageddon and rebirth in the Fifth. There are those who believe that—with liberal interpretation—most have already been fulfilled. The First Sign mentions the coming of the white man. Others perhaps prefigured railways, catastrophic oil spills, the Internet, and 1960s counterculture.

Only the Ninth had not yet been deemed to have come fully to pass, as it involved a blue star appearing in the heavens and crashing to Earth. Other elements of that Ninth Prophecy, however—the “white man battling against people in other lands”—well, yeah, that’s a known thing.

You could choose therefore to believe we were on the brink of fulfilling the prophecy, waiting only for that blue star/meteor/spaceship to push us over. You could believe this if you were a little crazy, and if you were a little crazy, then you might want to get ahead of the curve and preemptively claim the place to hide out.

A site waiting patiently to repopulate the Earth.

You would try to find the ark.



I knew my reasoning didn’t stand up straight yet. It didn’t feel wrong, though.

It felt very far from wrong.

I heard Molly’s voice, quiet. “Oh dear God.”

Head still deep in my notes, I looked up from the phone to see her staring up the passage toward the main room. I angled the glow from my phone screen to make it brighter.

Something stood at the edge of the glow, remaining mostly in shadow.

It was about the size of a young horse. It had a clump of algae on one bulky shoulder, and its hide was still wet. It stared back at us curiously, angling its head.

A single dead-straight and pure white horn protruded from its forehead.

It turned and walked away into the darkness.

Molly didn’t move a muscle. “What…was that?”

“A unicorn,” I said.





Chapter

45



We woke the other two. We discussed it, very briefly, and the consensus was firmly in favor of not following the animal Molly and I had just seen. We were plain terrified now.

“Come on, Nolan,” Ken said, and even he sounded freaked out. “You’re now badly in the realm of made-up shit.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “The weird thing about unicorns is that the Greeks never mentioned them in mythology. Only in their natural histories. They didn’t think unicorns were legendary. They believed they were real. And the thing we saw was only fairly horselike. Who knows, maybe it was a young Elasmotherium.”

“Which is?”

“Was. Northern European style of rhino. Which some people think may have outlasted the most recent ice age and overlapped with humans, maybe even giving rise to stories of reclusive unicorns.”

I took them through the thoughts I’d just had, the ideas I’d mashed together into a possible explanation for this place. Molly immediately began asking questions and making objections, while nervously glancing up the passage. Pierre stared at me like I’d started talking in a foreign language.

Ken, bless him, simply went with it. If Satan himself turned up at Ken’s house—wreathed in sulfur and lightning bolts—Ken would give him a hard time for not bringing enough wine/cigarettes/vodka but otherwise tell him to pull up a deck chair and make himself at home.

“This ball, though,” he said. We were beside it, huddled close together, apart from Pierre, who was standing a couple of yards up the passage keeping an eye out. “Assuming you’re right, Nolan. Bonkers though it sounds. Why trap everything in here? If this is the machine that reboots life on Earth, you want it all to be able to get out of here afterward, right?”

“To which there’s three possible answers.”

“Christ, you and your fucking brain. Can’t there just be one answer to any given question, and it always be good news?”

“First is…the ball wasn’t supposed to be triggered. It was a last-resort defense in case the site came under attack, and it’s just bad luck Gemma stood on the thing.”

“That idea’s shit. Next.”

“Second is there is a way out, but we haven’t found it yet. Best bet for that is the other end of the paintings room.”

“Which we can’t get at. That idea’s shit, too.”

“Third is there’s some way of resetting the physical environment, once the things created in here are ready to leave and populate the cleansed Earth. Of moving the ball and reopening the passage.”