The Anomaly(90)

My phone was down to ten percent battery and I couldn’t hold it and climb at the same time anyway. So I took the last remaining lanyard light instead. No way of telling how much power remained. No way of doing anything about it.

We decided to have Pierre lead the way. There was an argument that Moll, as the person in least pain—and with both arms functioning properly—should go first. But Pierre was firm on the subject. He was, he pointed out, the person most likely to fall. He didn’t want anyone below him if that happened. We couldn’t argue with that logic so we helped him over the ledge into the shaft and made sure he had a solid grip on the first of the handholds with his good hand.

“You sure about this?” Molly asked.

He didn’t answer. He started down.

Molly went next. When she was in the shaft, I hung the light around her neck. She looked up at me. We knew what we were leaving behind, and who, and that there wasn’t anything that could be said about it. Not now.

I sat on the ledge for a minute to give her clearance. I could hear more thuds in the distance. The machine doing whatever it was supposed to do. Maybe they’d be heavy enough to trigger some seismological measuring system in the area and people would come investigate. Probably not.

Most likely everything Dylan had spoken of was going to come to pass, as it had been foretold.

Still. At least it wasn’t completely and utterly my fault.



I don’t even know how Pierre did it. I assume he was able to use his hampered hand to at least grab a lower hold each time he moved his good one down. I heard a few grunts and a couple of times when he wasn’t able to stifle a sharp, pained intake of breath. Otherwise he just climbed. We moved quickly, maybe too quickly. Pierre evidently realized he wouldn’t be able to keep this up forever, that his good arm would tire, and there was only one possible outcome if that happened. There was a risk, also, though, that going fast would just bring this on sooner.

Molly climbed silently and steadily in his wake.

I descended in a cloud of if-only. I knew how dumb it was but I couldn’t stop. When the here-and-now sucks that badly, you can’t help retracing the steps that got you there. Going backward down the shaft only made it worse—as if we were retreating into a past where, had I but possessed the sense to think ahead, there might have been a different path.

If you start unpicking the threads the garment falls apart, however, and it’s hard to tell which were the most important seams. Sure, there was the evening when I decided it’d be worth trying to find Kincaid Cavern. But before that there was not really paying attention when Ken said we had a new sponsor—just thinking, great, more kudos, and hopefully more money than the dumb books I’d been working on. Which I needed because the job I did before hadn’t worked out. Which I needed because I wasn’t with the woman I should be with. Which happened at least partly because I came out of a bar in North Hollywood—not especially drunk—and decided to go talk to Kristy’s friend about the email she’d sent. I swear to God I did not intend the evening to go the way it did, at least consciously, but there are covert machineries in our minds and souls, and they take us places we don’t know exist until we find ourselves stranded there, exhausted and aghast at ourselves.

You can tell yourself if only, but the truth is you never know about the big things until it’s too late. It’s always the wave you don’t see coming that will knock you down.

What the hell was I going to tell Ken’s wife?

It was going to have to be me. I owed him that. I knew her, a little. We’d had dinner together a number of times. They met back when she had a walk-on in The Undying Dead. That had been the high point of her acting career but now she helped run an animal shelter and a homeless literacy program. She was smart and calm and a good person and I knew that Ken took her advice on most things. Or listened to it, at least. I also knew she felt he should stop fucking around with webcasts and low-rent conspiracy nuts and work harder at getting back into the movie business—and that she regarded me with suspicion, both professionally and personally (like I said, she’s smart).

I didn’t know, because of course Ken hadn’t said, how they’d parted on the morning he’d driven the Kenmobile around to pick us all up and embark on this disaster. Had he given her a quick peck on the cheek? Or a real hug, and an “I love you”?

No idea. But I was going to have to tell her.

And it was my fault.



Down and down and down and down and down.

I gave up trying to mitigate the pain across my chest and stomach. I told myself it was merely an infection or a muscle spasm exacerbating the low-level discomfort I’d felt ever since Gemma nearly fell off the canyon wall.

Down and down and down.

“It can’t be far now,” Molly said. Her voice was slurred.

“We’re going to get there.”

I realized she’d sounded that way because she was crying, but I didn’t have anything else to say.

And I also didn’t tell her—because it wouldn’t have helped, or made any difference to our present course of action—that for the last ten minutes I’d been pretty sure I could hear noises from above me. Not thuds this time.

The sound of something climbing down the shaft after us.

Climbing fast.





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