Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Vol 15

I woke up this morning no longer sure I am who I thought was. I showered, dressed and ate breakfast, feeling like an intruder in my own home. I sat in the Expedition, spoke to Rydell on the radio and drove up towards Hunter Mountain, feeling I was watching another man try out my life. I had hoped to find some certainties up there, something to which I could anchor myself but all I found was that everything flows. I didn’t need to see it to know it was happening. Even the forests of pinyon pine and juniper were further down the mountain slopes than they were the day before.

In the spring, after heavy winter rainfalls, wild flowers turn certain parts of the Valley into a blaze of purple, red and orange. It wasn’t possible to reconcile such beauty with that scorched and barren hell. If such a vastness could be transformed in what, in geological terms, was less than the blink of an eye, how could any of us hope to ever stay the same?

All those voices I heard on the radio — how could I be sure that they were speaking to me? If I couldn’t be certain who I was, then how could they know I was the one they wanted to talk to? So when Rydell’s voice came out of the radio, I had no way of knowing if it was really him. Short of driving down to Furnace Creek and standing right in front of him. And even then, there was no guarantee.

I heard Hannafin — or someone who sounded like her — asking where I was. I wanted to answer her but when I tried to talk I realized that I had nothing to say. I already knew where I was and where I was going. There was nothing Hannafin, or the voice that might have been hers, could do for me that I couldn’t do for myself.

This person I had become had no more illusions. He was capable of seeing things as they really were. As he drove past the talc mines, across Ulida Flat and north into Hidden Valley, he was aware the land was watching him. He heard the creak of Joshua trees, the distant groans of the mountain ranges and the listless sigh of an unfelt breeze. And in those sounds he heard himself also, speaking in his usual voice, his tone neutral, the words precise, as he told them all they needed to know, the way he always did. Only it wasn’t him talking.

The SUV is pulled off the dirt road onto the edge of the playa. The front passenger’s door stands open. I glance up towards Ubehebe Peak, see no movement among the stands of mesquite. Approaching the vehicle, I move round the back and peer through the windscreen. There are two large suitcases behind the rear seat. I continue on round the Toyota till I come back to the open door. I reach inside and grab the carry-all on the rear seat. Inside is a money belt with close to four hundred dollars in cash, plus a book of travellers’ cheques. There’s also a Nike fanny pack in there with three passports, a driver’s licence and car-hire documentation. I look at the photographs, just for a moment, then put everything back in the holdall. On the floor by the front passenger’s seat, there’s a video camera. It’s a Sony Hi-8 and the tape is about three-quarters of the way through. I sit on the running board, my feet resting on the ground, trying to decide what to do. The last thing I want to do right now is play the tape but I know that if I don’t I’ll never find the answers I need. Flipping open the viewfinder, I touch the play button and get nothing but blue. I press and hold the rewind, listening to the machine whirr as the world runs back to where it has already been. I watch shadows grow westwards from the Cottonwood Range and a strip of broken cloud which pulls itself together as it scrolls back across the sky. After a minute I release the button and the tape rolls forward.

Sophie Delauney and her daughter walk out of their apartment at Stovepipe Wells, holding hands. They stop halfway across the parking lot and Sophie turns, smiles and waves toward the camera before continuing on to the Rav4. The scene changes to a view of Ubehebe Grater from the north rim, stretching a half-mile across and five hundred feet deep. The girl skips into the shot from the right, Delauney from the left. Something blurs the picture for a second or two, but I can’t tell what it is — a hand or part of a face in extreme close-up. Delauney talks about how the crater was formed, sounding vaguely authoritative. The kid complains about the heat. Next I see Sophie and the girl standing in front of the sign at Teakettle Junction. Delauney enters the frame from the left. The girl has a stick and she starts tapping out a rhythm on the kettles and pots hanging from the arms of the wooden cross. Sophie and Delauney start dancing round her, whooping like a couple of movie Indians. They look foolish but the girl laughs. No one seems to notice the single shadow that slips down the mountain behind them.

The scene changes abruptly, showing the three of them sitting in their vehicle, smiling and waving. After a second or two, I realize that there’s no soundtrack. They get out of the Toyota and start walking directly towards the camera, their faces growing in the frame. The jump cut I’m expecting doesn’t happen. Instead, as Delauney draws close, the scene shifts slightly to the left and catches his face in profile as he walks past the spot where the camera had been. It catches the other two as they walk by, then turns and tracks them to the side of the road. Their smiles have disappeared and they avoid looking at the camera until something prompts Sophie to glance up and say a single word which might have been “please”. Moments later, she takes the girl by the hand and walks out onto the playa. After a second or two, Delauney wipes his face and follows them. The camera pans left and zooms in on the Grandstand to the north, holding the outcrop in the frame for what seems like an eternity. Nothing moves onscreen, even when I hold down the fast-forward button. When I release it, the camera moves upwards to capture a clear and cloudless sky. The tape has played almost to the end. The final shot is of Sophie, Delauney and the kid, three hundred yards out on the playa, growing smaller as they walk on without looking back. And then the screen turns blue.

My head has started aching and the heat is almost intolerable. I put the camera on the seat, understanding what I have to do. At my vehicle I grab the radio, press the call button and speak my name. Instead of voices all that comes out is feedback and white noise. I try once more but whatever I hear, it isn’t human. I lack the will to do this, but there’s no one else. I load half a dozen bottles of water into a backpack, grab my binoculars and head out onto the playa.

There are no tracks in the honeycombed surface. I walk five hundred yards due east, a little further than I had seen them go before the tape had stopped. I figure they must have been looking for the rocks, or at least for one of their trails. I look north to where the slanting sunlight blurs the edges of the Grandstand. Shielding my eyes, I turn my gaze southwards and pick out a few rocks of varying sizes scattered across the dry mud. There’s little else to see out here, no signs of life. I head south and try not to think about the tape and the expressions on their faces as they had trudged past the camera. Almost twenty minutes pass before I am walking among the silent, unmoving rocks. Though I don’t want to admit it, their watchful stillness bothers me. I don’t want to think about what they’ve seen. Instinctively, I lay a hand on the Sig Sauer at my hip, drawing some comfort from the touch of the gun. There’s a picture forming in my head. It’s the haunted look in Sophie’s eyes as she stared at the camera for the last time, just before she took the child’s hand in her own and started walking. I’d like to think that she looked back one last time but I really can’t be sure.