The Anomaly(97)

Then we had to make a decision about how to proceed.

After a long discussion we loaded Feather’s body onto the dinghy and took it back upriver. Then Molly and I hauled her up the wall to the opening of the cavern. Feather had been slight of build, but no dead person is ever light. Bodies, like past life events, turn into black holes, sucking the gravity of the future into themselves.

We made it, barely. It took forever, pulling and pushing the body a foot at a time, and it was very, very tough. We laid her out in the antechamber cave inside the cavern, and though she had not only meant us grave harm but tried hard to bring it to pass, the knowledge that we were going to leave her there was still dreadful.

But what was the alternative? Neither burying her on the beach nor throwing her in the river was safe. The only other option was taking her with us when we struck out down the canyon the next morning—a far longer and more arduous journey—handing both her and ourselves in to the cops when we reached civilization.

Molly was all for doing this, and Pierre, too. She’d tried to kill us, they said. We were in the right. The police would see that. Ken and I weren’t so sure. Of course hiding a corpse felt terrible. But even if we claimed we’d come upon the body of a stranger, our own battered state would provoke an investigation, with us as the prime suspects. A check at the hotel would reveal that Molly had booked five rooms, too. The only chance we’d have of escaping from the situation would be to tell the truth—including about what we’d found.

Again, Pierre and Molly were all for this. Couldn’t see why we wouldn’t, in fact. Get everything out in the open. Tell the world. Shed a light.

Perhaps you have to be a little older to realize some things should remain in the dark. That the world at large isn’t ready for them, can’t be trusted with their care, and they need to be kept hidden. At any cost.

After we’d climbed back down to the dinghy there was further discussion, which I eventually put on hold by saying at least Feather’s body would be safe there. If we decided we needed to go the other route, we could tell the authorities where she could be found.

We dozed away the remaining hours of night, and next morning set off up the river. We hiked back up the canyon wall to the top. We got back to the hotel and retrieved our belongings. We came home.



I’d thought I had been comfortable with the decision we’d made in the canyon. As the days slowly passed back home, however, it became clear that I was not.

There were two bodies lying in darkness. Three, if you included Gemma, or what was left of her—assuming anything except dust remained of her and Dylan, after the purifying fire the site had unleashed upon itself. Gemma’s death had not been our fault but that only made it worse. It doesn’t matter how deep you bury an incriminating letter in the trash, it’s still there. It doesn’t matter how far you push a body back into a tunnel, either. That’s still there, too.

Even if it has been destroyed, it’s still there.

You know this already. You’ll have bodies stashed in tunnels of your own. Things you’ve done, mistakes you’ve made, secrets you hold—the guilt you carry for moments that stick out in your past like black stars in the firmament of your inner life. The outlier occurrences. The anomalies. The events you look back upon in disbelief, wondering how the hell they could have come to pass, and if they can be made to fit in a story you are prepared to own.

But the truth is you get where you’re going not through the long, forgettable years of sticking to the path, but through the moments when you wander off it. It’s the things that don’t make sense that reveal who you are inside.

The anomalies make you who you are.

That realization will not make you feel any better about them. Time may help you turn a blind eye, but guilt is the stain that never goes away.

In the last twenty-four hours I’d become aware that part of my mind—one I hadn’t used very often since the afternoon I’d walked all the way to the beach from Hollywood and decided I was done with being a screenwriter—was working at the story of what had happened. Rewriting it. Seeking a way of bringing it to a different conclusion.

Eventually—just before I’d gone to bed the night before—I believed I’d gotten an alternative narrative straight in my head. A way of making it appear as though I alone had been responsible for what happened to Feather and Dylan and Gemma, without having to mention what we’d found in Kincaid Cavern.

I would write it down, email it to Ken, and tell him to stick to the script and make sure the others did the same.

Because it was true. If I hadn’t dragged us all out on that expedition, three people would still be alive. And the four people still living wouldn’t have to get up every morning with those deaths in their minds, wondering when payment would come due—either from God, or someone much closer to home.

Perhaps there are people within whose lives that guilt can be accommodated.

Mine isn’t one of them.



At the far end of the promenade, where it runs out and turns to beach, I stopped for a cigarette, sitting on the low wall facing the sea. It was still early and there was nobody else in sight. I smoked, gazing vaguely down at the sand.

After a few minutes something dropped onto the ground in front of me. For a moment I couldn’t work out what it was.

I picked it up.

A necklace. With an ankh on it. Something I’d last seen hanging around Feather’s neck, when Molly and I laid out her body in the entrance to the cavern.