The Anomaly(84)

“Light, Nolan!”

I redirected it upward again. Molly was more than twenty feet up the wall now. “I see something. There’s…There’s an opening up here! There’s an opening!”

“Great. Keep going,” I said as calmly as I could, knowing that with the panting and the pounding of blood in her ears, she had no idea how close the animals were to us.

“I see it,” Pierre said. “Nolan, start climbing. We can take it from here without light.”

Maybe they could. I wasn’t so sure about me. I’m not a climber. Especially not in the dark. But I guess you play these things through to the end.

I stuck the light in my mouth and reached out for the holds that I’d seen him use. I pulled up off the ground, and immediately slipped back down again.

The coyotes—assuming that’s what they were—weren’t howling anymore. That wasn’t because they’d given up and turned around. They knew they’d found something worth pursuing. They probably even knew, in that spooky way animals do, that their prey wasn’t in a position to run.

They were closing in, coming forward in the darkness.

I could hear feet trotting along the rock floor now, and I smiled to myself, sensing that—whether it be heaven or hell—it was likely I was going to get a chance to punch Ken in his spectral face a lot sooner than I might have hoped.

“For God’s sake, Nolan!” Pierre shouted, breaking me back to awareness. “Climb.”

I tried again on the handholds, using all the strength I had. I felt my fingers slipping once more but reached up and grabbed, and then again, pulling up and up, getting my right foot onto the lowest ledge. Got a few feet higher but then felt myself losing it again, toppling backward, not sure I could do anything about it, as the scrabbling paws got closer.

I threw my hand up and found another hold but it wasn’t enough to keep me tight to the rock. I felt myself starting to fall and tried to twist in toward the wall, hearing Molly shouting down at me, no content in her words, only urgency.

I thought I was going to tumble to the ground but I felt my back thud into the opposite wall and realized I’d gotten far enough up to use it like a chimney. I reached behind with one hand and pushed up with my feet, inching up, trying to get far enough from the floor that I couldn’t be jumped at.

I twisted around to look below at the exact moment something launched itself up at me.

The beam of the light in my mouth slashed across the slavering face of a coyote, or something like one, leaping up at me. Its jaws were wide and rife with teeth. It had an extra eye, not quite centered, in its forehead.

“Oh dear God.” My voice was muffled around the light.

“What?” Molly called, panicky.

“Never mind.”

The next lunge, from a different creature, nearly reached me, and in trying to turn away I slipped—but only a couple of inches. I pulled and shoved and inched my back up the wall, in a cacophony of howls and strangled barks—until I heard Pierre shout at me to shove off from the back wall and throw my weight in his direction.

I did, and felt his hand grab me firmly around the wrist. He pulled as I pushed up with my feet. My wrists scraped across a jagged edge and I knew I was almost there.

Molly started pulling now, too, but then there was a deep, shuddering thud—something that reverberated through the rock as if a meteor had landed on the Earth’s surface high above. If they hadn’t been holding me I would have tumbled straight down the wall again.

I scrabbled up over the edge and into another fissure.

“What was that?” Molly asked.

I shrugged and headed onward, trying not to think about the owners of the bones below, or how close they had been to finding a way up. And maybe out.





Chapter

49



The fissure we found ourselves in was taller and wider than the one between the smelling room and the gallery. Though apparently natural, and far from straight, in the dim light from the phone it showed signs of having been worked. I found this reassuring, insofar as I was capable of experiencing that emotion, because it suggested a route of sufficient importance to have merited the effort.

All three of us were stumbling now, using our hands to support ourselves along the wall as we lurched as quickly as we could along the tunnel. There were further distant thudding noises. It was hard to be sure, but these felt as though they were caused by impacts at a level below us.

“Is that what it sounded like? What you heard in the night?”

“Yes,” Pierre said. “Similar, anyway. It’s the balls dropping into that bigger pool, isn’t it?”

“I think so. The site is stepping up to phase two.”

“Which means more of those things are going to appear,” Molly said.

“Lots more. The console in the first pool room implied a hundred types. We haven’t seen anywhere near that number. The bigger pool only had one option on offer. Could be that’s something else.”

“What?”

“Something bad, with horns. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Are you…okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said. That wasn’t true, of course. I was in an increasing amount of pain. The gashes across my chest felt like they were burning hot. Either that or very cold. I wasn’t sure. Nerve endings in tearing discomfort, either way, and the sensation was spreading down from the slashes into the muscles of my stomach wall, burying itself deeper. I didn’t see any point in sharing this information.