The Anomaly(83)

The regrets kept coming in waves, deeper each time. If only we hadn’t lost time looking at the bigger pool, trying to work out a way of getting a drink that in the end didn’t happen anyway. If only I’d gotten his point about Feather overhearing us more quickly. Or he hadn’t made me slog there. If only we hadn’t gone back for the hard drives.

I realized I wasn’t going anywhere useful, and I would end up being a liability to the others if I kept swirling around the vortex. The past is full of if-onlys and they’re all bullshit. You only think that way when it’s too late. You only if-only, as Ken would have said, when you’re already screwed.

So I shoved them all to the deep back of my mind and we hurried to the end of the room.



Soon after the point we’d reached on our first visit, the gallery tapered in rapidly from both sides. After another ten feet it ended abruptly in a narrow crevice—this distant end of the room, like this entire space, showing no sign of the workmanship so evident throughout the rest of the complex. There was no way through the crack. I shoved my hand into it and found an extra pocket of space beyond, but my fingers reached the end of that, too. There was no way forward.

There was a dull crunching sound under my feet when I moved, and I turned the light down in that direction.

“What…are they?” Molly said.

I squatted down. “Bones.”

“From…”

“The last people who got stuck in here, presumably. The ones who made the paintings. While they waited to…”

There were five skulls that I could see. Five full skeletons. I’d just trodden through more Neolithic bones than had ever been discovered in the rest of the world, put together. Bones of the beings that had huddled together here at the end of this cavern, waiting for the end. Recording what they’d seen, until they ran out of energy. Until they starved and died.

“What now?” Pierre said. He hadn’t said a word about Ken since it happened, but he didn’t have to. The underlying panic in his voice said it all. Suddenly the ground beneath his feet had disappeared, and he knew it, and he wasn’t sure that I represented a viable plan B. “What the hell now?”

Molly took the phone from him and pointed it upward. This showed a sheer, narrow wall of jagged rock, stretching up into darkness. “It has to be up there,” she said.

“Or we’re just plain wrong,” I said. “And Feather overheard it some way we’ve forgotten or she wasn’t answering my question after all.”

“That idea sucks,” she said, handing the phone to me. “And I’m bored with things sucking.”

She squared up to the wall. Found sufficient hold with both hands to start inching her way up, using the wall opposite to patch together a half-assed chimney climb. She was breathing hard before she’d even gone a few feet. She looked very different from the girl who’d confidently made her way up the canyon wall when we’d spotted the entrance to this place. Skinnier, beyond exhausted, someone at the end of her resources but giving it one last try because that’s what you do, rather than in any hope of success.

I wished we’d drunk some water from the bigger pool, with our hands if necessary. It was hard to see how it could have made the situation worse. But that was another if-only.

“See anything?” I realized this was a dumb question as soon as it was out of my mouth. The source of light was still in my hand. I held it higher, hoping I wouldn’t be called upon to do any fast thinking soon.

“Nope.”

Pierre rooted around in his pack and pulled out the remaining flashlight. This about doubled the height of the wall we could see, to perhaps twenty feet. No opening was visible. To my inexperienced eye there was little in the way of handholds, either. There was no guarantee there would be any way out of here, of course—and the former inhabitants of the bones around my feet evidently hadn’t found one. This wasn’t a video game, some tough but resolvable puzzle constructed for recreational amusement. There didn’t have to be a way out. Even if Feather genuinely had overheard us this way, it didn’t mean there was a way up or down from whatever speculated opening might be above.

I kept this thought to myself.

Suddenly Pierre turned his head. “What was that?”

“What?”

He held a hand up for silence.

I heard it then. A howling, yipping noise, echoing from the fissure at the other end of the gallery.

“Sounds like coyotes,” Molly said, voice matter-of-fact but straining with effort as she kept heading upward.

“Fuck. Can coyotes swim?”

“Oh yeah. They’ll get across that room easily. And they’ll attack just about anything if they’re hungry enough.”

I grabbed the light from Pierre and told him to start climbing.

“But you’re not going to be able to—”

“Just do it, Pierre. I’ll be right behind.”

Molly started flapping out with her hands, grabbing at anything that might serve as a hold, moving as quickly as she could. Pierre started up the wall. There was no question he was the better climber, and still pretty strong.

I alternated between watching what he was doing—in the laughable hope of replicating his moves—and glancing toward the other end of the gallery. The snarling sounds were getting closer, echoing strangely from the fissure. It sounded like there were more than two throats involved. Maybe things didn’t only leave this ark two by two after all. Maybe once it was activated, it kept going. A first pair, and then further pairs, until the balls of elements were used up—in the smaller pool, and then the vastly bigger one, and perhaps others we hadn’t found—until it had produced a sufficient population for the creatures to start reproducing by themselves. To repopulate the Earth.