The Anomaly by Michael Rutger

Author:Michael Rutger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2018-06-19T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter

30

The room was deeper than I’d realized, and it was twenty yards before we got to Molly. The back wall hadn’t been shaped and smoothed and right-angled like the others, and looked like a remnant of an originally natural space, a cavern deep underground. In the middle was an opening. It, too, looked natural, a crack in the rock, tapering sharply at the top and bottom and about two, three feet wide in the middle.

Molly shone the light directly into it, revealing a rough, slanting, and narrow passage beyond.

“Now we’re talking,” Ken said.

“Should we tell the others before we check it out?”

“No,” I said. “We’re here now. And we need someone holding the fort back there for when Feather gets back. If it looks like this is going a significant distance, someone can go fetch them. Bummer we didn’t bring a headlamp, though.”

Molly handed me the light. I stepped up into the “passage,” which in reality—this became clear when you got into it—was a very ragged fissure. Despite the hundreds of thousands of man-hours spent chiseling and shaping nearby, it seemed like nobody had done anything to this part.

“It gets kind of tight up ahead,” I said.

“What are you implying?” Ken asked.

“Nothing, you ass. Just I’m wondering why they never worked it, made it like the other passages.”

“Is it possible it happened after this place was built? Earthquake damage?”

“Maybe. I’m not a geologist. But I’m thinking not, because the end wall was uneven, too. It’s more as though this thing was already here when they built the rest of it, and they decided to preserve its natural state for some reason.”

I moved along the fissure, carefully. The floor was very uneven and had cracks big enough to twist your ankle in. Once I was a few feet down Ken followed, with Molly at the back.

After a while the crack jagged to the left, and got narrower. Narrow enough, in fact, that we had to move sideways along it. And then stoop.

“Are we even sure this is going anywhere?” Molly’s voice was tight. “By which I mean anywhere we want to be?”

After another twenty feet I stopped. The top of the crevice was getting lower and lower, though thankfully the smell had abated. “We’re nearly going to have to crawl through this next part,” I said. “If anybody wants to bail…this is probably the moment.”

“Just keep going,” Ken said.

I hung the light around my neck and lowered to a crouch. Took a deep breath. I don’t have a particular problem with confined spaces, but this was very confined indeed. A low, insistent voice in the back of my mind wasn’t happy, and was toying with the idea of panicking. If Molly managed to make it through this section, she was a hell of a lot braver than me. Assuming this wasn’t merely the beginning of the end of the fissure, of course, the point where it dwindled to nothing. The light wasn’t showing far enough to tell.

We kept going. I thought there was a slight upward trajectory, though not one that would make a difference.

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