The Anomaly(80)

“You think?”

“Definitely,” he said. “Earlier it was like molasses. It’s looser now.”

“Still pretty thick, though,” Ken said. “And we don’t know how deep it is down the end, do we?”

“The room’s only thirty yards long,” I said. “We can make it that far.”

“Maybe.”

“Of course we can.”

“Look,” Ken muttered, “I can’t fucking swim, all right?”

“Seriously?”

“I grew up in London in the 1970s and I’m not a masochist, Cali-boy. Life on land only got started in the first place because all the fish decided to get the fuck out of the North Sea because it was too bloody cold. Assuming,” he added, “that evolution…is even a thing. Which, judging by what’s happening here right now, it may not be. Christ.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “We’ll get you across.”

“How?”

“Basic life-saving technique,” Pierre said. “I swim on my back, arm around you from behind, pull you along.”

“Fuck’s sake.”

Pierre nodded decisively. “Two minutes,” he said, turning toward the main room.

“Where are you going?”

“The drives are in my pack.”

“Drives?”

“Hard drives. The footage of everything we’ve seen in here. I’m not going without them.”

“Okay, but Jesus—we discussed this,” I said. “We stay together.”

Which was still a sensible policy, and we were all keen to get a break from the smell, too…

But it was a mistake.



It was clear from the state of Gemma’s remains that something had visited her again in our absence.

I reached for my backpack but realized there was nothing in there I needed. Ken and Molly made the same call about their own packs. The lighter we were traveling, the better. We quickly loaded the portable drives into Pierre’s bag.

“How waterproof are these disks?”

“Not very. I’m thinking I’ll take the pack across first, holding it up above my head, then throw it up into the fissure. That’ll give me a chance to assess the liquid, too, and check if there’s anything we need to know about below the surface.”

“Like what?” Molly asked nervously.

“Just pyramids. Most of the rooms here have got them,” he said. “And they’re getting hotter, right? Maybe that’s what made the gunk in there loosen up. We don’t want to trip over one. Or get burned by it, if they’re even hotter now.”

“Okay, good thinking,” I said. “Let’s put the phones in your bag, too.”

As we were doing that, there was a sound. The one we’d been hearing for the last half hour. Much louder this time, however, and coming from the corridor that led to the original pool. A kind of a grunting noise, but with a whispering texture around the edges.

It wasn’t good. It wouldn’t have been good if we’d heard it in the middle of a sunlit meadow. Trapped in a pitch-dark abandoned ancient anomaly half a mile underground, it was really very not-good indeed.

“What the hell is that?” Molly whispered.

“I don’t know. But it’s not wolves. It’s too deep, too loud. Too big-sounding. To be honest, I don’t want to find out.”

The sound came again, but from a different corridor.

“There’s two of them,” Ken said quietly. “They’re grid-searching, looking for us. Let’s go. Now.”



Molly, Ken, and I stood in the corridor outside the room. There was a brief whispered debate about whether it’d make sense to divest ourselves of clothes while crossing, sending them ahead in Pierre’s backpack, to stop us taking the appalling smell with us afterward. The opposing view—that we wanted as little skin contact with the gunk as possible—won out, not least as the only thing we’d have to wipe the crap off with after the crossing was…our clothes.

Molly positioned the camera on her shoulder and directed the light down the room. It reached far enough to catch the edge of the fissure, giving Pierre a straight-line course.

“Be careful,” Ken told him. “And if you feel anything moving under there, come the hell back out.”

Pierre nodded, held his pack up above his head, and started to walk into the liquid.

“It’s still thicker than water,” he said as the level got above his knees. “Though—” He stopped talking abruptly and retched. “Holy crap it smells bad.”

But he kept going. The depth increased rapidly. Within another minute it was up to his waist. Then his chest. He was making near-constant coughing and retching sounds now.

“Okay,” he said, when he was halfway across the room. “I’m going to have to start treading water now. Or not water. Whatever this stuff actually is.”

He paused, adjusted his angle, and moved forward again. He kept the hand holding the pack aloft. He dropped the other into the liquid and started walking. After a few moments it became clear from the movements of his head that his feet were no longer touching the bottom, and he was treading water, using his hand as a paddle to laboriously pull forward.