The Anomaly(96)

There was a figure lying on the ground.

A woman was kneeling astride her, holding up the knife for one more hack into the figure’s chest.

She looked up as she heard us coming, eyes bright and wide in a face splattered with blood.

“That’s enough, Molly,” I said.

But she brought the knife down into Feather one more time.





From the files of Nolan Moore:





Chapter

56



Five days later I woke from a dream.

I won’t describe it in detail because much of it was muddy and confused and because other people’s dreams are always boring, like their coincidences. Both gain resonance through their roots in the individual’s history and character: Unless you’re that person you simply won’t get it, or understand why a dream might feel like it enshrines insights or judgments out of reach to the conscious mind. I’ll give you the gist. It had been the same three nights in a row. It was quite direct. I’m a pretty simple guy.

I was somewhere utterly dark. There was a sense of a dreadful secret, something I’d done that would color everything forever. Though I could see nothing, I knew I was in a tunnel, and there were two directions I could choose to go.

One led to the outside, to escape, to freedom.

The other led back to the bad thing.

I wanted to go the first way, of course. I started crawling that way in the fetid dark. But I realized there could be no release in that direction, no future worth inhabiting, unless I dealt with what was behind. So I laboriously maneuvered myself around in the cramped, dusty passage and set off in the other direction, back toward the bad thing. I crawled and crawled, squeezing myself into the ever-tighter and more claustrophobic tunnel into the past.

But I couldn’t find it. The bad thing wasn’t there anymore.

Except…it was, really. It was just farther. It would always be farther. Always just out of reach.

Because what’s done is done.



I woke for good a little before five a.m. Though it was not yet dawn, my bedroom wasn’t fully dark. Since returning to Santa Monica I’ve left the drapes wide open at night.

I put on sweat pants and a hoodie and made a thermos of coffee. Rounded up my cigarettes and a lighter and went for a walk. A few minutes from my apartment will get you to the promenade along the beach. At that time of day there’s nobody around but lunatic joggers taking pre-pre-meetings via earpieces and homeless people spread-eagled on the grass or determinedly shoving a shopping cart loaded with their inexplicable possessions. The previous morning—when I’d woken at a similar time, after a similar night—I’d turned right, toward the pier.

So this morning I went left, toward Venice Beach.

I walked slowly. I hadn’t appreciated until I got back to LA just how many parts of me were hurting, or how much. Not only from blows or collisions with tunnel walls in the closing stages, but additional discomforts right back to the spasm incurred when Gemma nearly fell off the wall on our first ascent to the cavern. Too many aches to count. You don’t notice the toll life’s taking while it’s happening. Only when it stops.

I’d also lost seven pounds, and it’d been several days before I was anything like hydrated again. For thirty-six hours I’d labored under a dangerously high temperature, too, feeling as though there was something literally burning in my veins. It’s possible that was the case—that the claws of the thing that had gashed my chest had been carrying microorganisms from the pool. The fever got so bad that I considered going to the doctor, though I suspected any antibiotics they dispensed would have little chance of tackling bacteria that had presumably never been seen before. So I sat it out, wrapped in a blanket and sweating, and finally it started to fade.

I’m not sure it was a case of my body winning. It’s equally likely the same thing happened to those microscopic invaders as to their much larger counterparts in the tunnels. Their programming failed, or the balls Pierre and I managed to get out of the pool led to systemic failures down the line. They died, fell apart, decayed.

Perhaps obsolescence was built into them. Perhaps it’s built into all of us.

I felt a little better this morning, thankfully. The body was doing its thing in the aftermath—repairing damage, restoring equilibrium. The equilibrium of a man in his forties doesn’t exactly make you feel like a young god, but I’ll take it. I’ll take it gladly.

The mind tries to do the same, to return to balance, and part of this is a conscious process. I had thought back over what happened, many times. Portions of the experience in the canyon were already hard to access with clarity. Points of detail, the sharp edges of real things happening in real time, get sanded off in recollection. You wear them out. This is a normal function of the brain, the thing that enables us to stay sane after trauma. Exhaustion and dehydration amplify the effect. Parts of those days felt as dreamlike as what I’d encountered in the night.

But I knew they hadn’t been a dream.



The portions that most occupied me will not surprise you. I had not anticipated that I would ever look down to see my hands gripped around the throat of someone whose existence I had brought to a halt. Nor that I would have to gently pry a ten-inch chef’s knife from a woman’s hand, blood dripping from it onto the coarse sand of a hidden beach. After Ken helped Molly to her feet, and Pierre limped over, the four of us stood in a silence that was long and profound.