The Anomaly(85)

“I don’t believe you,” she said.

“Let’s keep moving, Moll.”



It’s not easy to maintain a sense of direction in a dark tunnel, especially when you’re doing your best to run, but it seemed to me that the fissure struck out at an angle for a long while, and then started to pull back around, curving in a gradual arc.

Then it was straight again, very straight. Both the walls and floor became much smoother, too.

“Have we been here before?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. I couldn’t be sure, but it didn’t feel like we’d curved around enough to rejoin the corridor off the main passage on the other side of the stone ball. “Pierre—you never made it to the end of either of those corridors before the ball, right?”

“No. So this could be…Oh.”

In front of us, the tunnel split into two.

“For God’s sake,” Molly said. “So which way do we go?”

“One way, together,” I said. “And if that’s not the right one, then we come back and go the other. Together.”

“But which?” Pierre asked. He sounded worse than scared now. He sounded truly desperate. “Which way, Nolan?”

“Right,” I said.

“But how do you know?”

“I don’t. It’s trial and error. It’s okay, Pierre—we’re going to get out of here.”

“I don’t think I can take much more of this,” he said. “I need to see some real light. I need some real air.”

I led us down the right fork, somehow confident it would be the correct one. But after curving harshly for about thirty feet, it dead-ended. No sign of anywhere to climb to. It simply stopped. In a site this complex, this was far beyond my comprehension. It was hard to believe they’d run out of time or energy. This side tunnel meant something. Just not to me.

And either it was my imagination, or there was something happening now, too. When you touched your hand to the wall, it felt as though it was vibrating.

“Christ,” Pierre said. “You said this was the right way.”

“I was wrong. It’s not the first time.”

We lurched quickly back to the fork. As we arrived there was a massive thud, far more resonant than any of the ones before. It sounded like something very heavy indeed.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” Pierre said. “If it’s making hundreds or thousands more of those things…”

“It’ll be okay,” Molly said, though she didn’t sound like she believed it. “Pierre, it’ll—”

“Seriously, Moll? What single part of this has been okay?”

“All the bits where we haven’t died,” I said, planting a hand on each of their backs and shoving them up the other tunnel.



The tunnel started off straight but then bent markedly to the right. It kept going, too. And got wider, until we could trot along three abreast.

“Stop,” Molly said suddenly.

“What?”

“There’s light ahead.”

Her eyes were better than mine. I hadn’t noticed it against the glow from the phone screen, weak though it was. When I turned it off I saw a soft light in the tunnel ahead.

We were still and silent for a minute. Heard nothing.

“It’s her,” Pierre whispered. “It’s Feather—coming back around to the gallery room.”

“So what do we do?”

“It’s three against one,” Molly said, her voice hard. “And I really kind of want to talk to her.”

I nodded. “Okay, so. Very, very quietly.”

They dropped back a pace and let me go first. Moving slowly and carefully made me more aware of the cramp in my stomach. The muscles were locking up. Could just be a spasm, the muscle wall twisted at some point in the last hour, accentuated by the fact my stomach had basically received three mouthfuls of food in the last two days. Hopefully it was that. If not, it was something from the claws of the thing that swiped me, or the gunk still smeared over me.

There was barely any sound from our feet on the floor, but I held my hand up every few yards, and we froze, and listened. Nothing—except for the low vibration I’d noticed, and which I still wasn’t entirely sure existed outside my own head.

Another few steps—still nothing.

But gradually it became clear there was a doorway ahead, a perfectly rectangular opening. Whatever was causing the glow lay beyond.

We crept closer and closer until we had no option but to commit, and stepped up to the edge of the room, and then into it, down a short flight of three steps—the first real steps, it struck me, that we’d seen in the entire site.

It was immediately clear that the space was devoid of people. But it wasn’t empty.

Molly came down after me. “What the hell…is this?”





Chapter

50



The room was large and perfectly square. The ceiling was low. A path led directly across a flat, open space. In each corner stood one of the stark pyramidal shapes we’d encountered throughout the complex, but much larger: about four feet high.

How could we see all this?

Because the room glowed.

I don’t know how else to describe it. The light didn’t come from any particular source. There were no fixtures on the walls or ceiling or floor, no torches or other forms of illumination. Light simply hung like a cloud within the space, a muted opalescent glow.