The Anomaly(79)

“Right. So we ran back in here and dealt with the clear and present danger. Then what?”

“We ate,” I said.

“And then?”

“Ken—can you just say the thing, whatever it is?”

“No. I need you to walk it through for me. To make sure I’m not missing something. After we ate, what then?”

“Fuck’s sake, Ken. You and I went to check out the pool straight after, thinking we’d try the water despite the risk. We bailed on the idea because of the algae and when we got back that’s when Gemma dropped her bombshell about Feather’s phone and the photo on it. We were deep into that when we heard Feather clapping. The end. So?”

“And we talked to her and she pretended to go, and then later you talked to her…And that’s when she mentioned the paintings. Right?”

“Right.”

Ken grinned at me. It was tired and lopsided, but it was real. “Come on, Nolan. Get there yourself, you muppet.”

I looked at him, frowning—and finally it dawned. “Shit,” I said. “Are you sure?”

“Not a hundred percent, but bloody close. It’s why I made you remember it step by step.”

I was silent for a moment, thinking back through the sequence of events again as rigorously as I could. “Christ.”

“Exactly.”

“Please, you two,” Molly said. “Stop doing this.”

“Feather knew what we’d been doing because she’d been listening behind the rock during the day,” I said. “Staying quiet. Eavesdropping on everything we said. Right?”

“Okay, so?”

“But we never mentioned the paintings.”

Molly blinked at me. “What?”

“Pierre,” I said. “When did you first hear about them?”

“When you and I went to check out the smelly room, and found the crap on the floor had melted.”

“None of us told you about them before?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Absolutely sure.”

“So,” I said. “Given she could not have overheard us, how did Feather know about them?”

“Oh,” Molly said. “Oh.”

“You’re still only halfway there,” Ken said, however. “Who knows what that bitch knows, or the people she works for. She talked about another site like this in Alaska. Maybe there’s others around the world. Could be they’ve all got cave paintings. That is not the point.”

I frowned. “Well then, what is?”

“It’s not that she knows about the paintings,” Molly said, evidently a step ahead of me now. “It’s that she knows that we’ve seen them.”

“And how would she know that, Nolan?”

“She…she could have assumed,” I said. “We’d been exploring. She just assumed we’d found them.”

“Is that the way it sounded?”

“No,” I admitted. “She told me the age as if answering a question. A question she’d overheard.”

“Which you asked…”

“…when we were there.”

Pierre looked back and forth between us. “But what does that mean?”

“It means you can get from the other side of that ball, to the other end of the paintings cavern,” Ken said. “That’s the only way she could have been in position to hear us, the only way she could know we’d found them.”

“It means there’s a way out,” I said. “Maybe.”

“It’s the best we’ve got,” Ken said, standing. He staggered, badly, veering back into the wall as if very drunk. Tried to right himself, but staggered again, and this time toppled heavily to the ground.

“Fuck,” he said. He looked old for a moment, lying on his side, trying to get up. Pierre and I went to help. And we both immediately keeled over onto our sides.

It would have been funny, except it wasn’t.

All three of us eventually got upright. Then Pierre and I reached a hand down to Molly, who’d simply watched all this, goggle-eyed. She took them and we pulled her up, gently.

“If we’re going to try this,” she said, “I think it needs to be soon.”

“No,” Ken said. He looked something like his usual self again, but exhausted and drawn. “It needs to be now.”

Then, from a distance—but closer than last time—came the sound of a low, rumbling growl, mixed with a keening howl.

“Or even sooner,” he said.





Chapter

47



Five minutes later we were in the stinking room. It was noticeably warmer than before and the smell had gotten worse, unbelievably. More open in texture, fresher, making it easier to work out what it reminded you of. The deeply, offensively rank odor of something two days into rotting—like a dead seal on a beach, or a rat caught in a trap in hot sun, but multiplied ten-thousand-fold. It assaulted the eyes and stomach like a living entity, making you retch until you coughed and your stomach heaved.

Despite this, Pierre waded out into it for a few yards before retreating with the rest of us to the doorway. “It’s more liquid than it was.”