Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year – Volume One

There's no way of gauging the time. The same unending tunnel, after the brief variation of the fork, in unending repetition. It just goes on. Perhaps it'll be like this forever. Perhaps we're all already dead. Perhaps we died in the school, or on the way to the Delph, or at some point on this journey and this is all the last hallucinatory moment of dying, stretching on out forever…

No good thinking that way. I force myself to keep paddling. My hands are numb. The damp chill of the air, a nip at first, but like a swarm of soldier ants eating through to the bone bite by tiny bite.

The air is stale and foul. An olfactory memory skitters across my nerves; the summer just gone, walking in a meadow, the smell of fresh-cut grass, flowers breathing perfume into air, soft, clean, clear air.

Treasure that memory, Paul. You aren't likely to have another like it.

Cold. The air stinks. My teeth have begun to chatter. What it must be like for the children, back in the smaller boats, I don't like to think. Is Frank Emerson alright back there? I ought to shout at him but I can't seem to. My jaw won't let me, refuses to let me waste the energy.

"Paul?" It's Jean. She's been crying. So have I, silently. I can feel the burn of the dried salt on my cheeks. Anya.

I'm wandering, vague, keep greying out. Radiation sickness? Or carbon monoxide? Or just going cold and tired? Be ironic that, if it's hypothermia and exhaustion that finishes the job. Maybe a kind of bleak triumph there, a bitter laugh at the death that thought it'd've have us.

"Paul?" Jean again. Her voice is cracked. She's been thinking about her husband, must've been with all this time on our hands, just paddling-well, the endless tunnel can sort of hypnotise you. Better if it does, in a way. If not, your mind begins to wander. I'd've been thinking about Anya so so much if not for that lucky effect. But Jean-

I met her husband once. A small, quiet man, balding and moustached. Bespectacled. Smoked a pipe. Scottish, like her. Glaswegian, or was he from Edinburgh? Sipped a Britvic orange in the pub at the staff do last Christmas while Jean got tipsy on Dubonnet. Did he work? From home, I think she said. What was he? An accountant, I think. They lived in the village. His-their-house was-

Can't remember. Burned to ashes anyway. Doubt he'd've had a chance. But at least, with Anya, I can be sure she's dead. Horrible, how easy you can accept that, the fact that the person you love the most in the world is gone. Oh, my heart's been ripped out of my chest. Well, there it is. There you go. Never mind.

Except I do mind, but what to do? It's keep going or stop and die. Some instinct or drive, something in me, won't just let me lie down and quit. It's not the responsibility for the kids that keeps me going. That's getting it backwards. That's why I seized control when the sirens went. It was my excuse for living. Anya would have approved.

"Just because I'm dead, Paul, doesn't mean you can give up."

No ma'am. I know that, darling.

"Keep going. We'll be together again one day."

Yeah, right. Now I know that's my imagination. Anya would never have said anything so trite, so twee, not even to motivate me. She'd been raised a Catholic, but lapsed long ago.

She was the most honest person I knew.

When you're dead, she'd told me bluntly, once, you're dead, that's it. You're a match that flares in the dark. You burn a few seconds and then you go out. A little poetic, but it was the small hours of one morning and we'd been smashed on bisongrass vodka and a couple of joints. In vodka veritas. You have seconds in the dark. Out of the dark and back into it. You have to use it while you can. Don't waste it.

It would be nice to think of my survival as my tribute to Anya, that I'm doing it for her, but-

"Paul?"

God damnit. I turn to Jean. "What?" My voice is gravel.

Her teeth are chattering too. Hard to tell in the gloomy backspill of light from the torch, but I think her lips are bluing from the cold.

"We can't keep going much longer," she whispers. "Look at us. We're nearly all in. The kids must be finished. I don't know how they keep going."

"Yeah. I know."

"We're gonna have to stop soon."

"I know." But where? That's the big question, isn't it?

I'm about to confess I have nothing left, no ideas, when I become aware of something. A current in the sluggish water, pulling the boat sideways.

"What-"

I flash the torch. There's a sound too, a new one-I've missed it from being so lulled by the repetitive journey. It's water, rushing. I flick the torch-beam ahead. It skates along the wall on the left, and then plunges through into darkness.

"What's th-"

Something's punched a hole in the tunnel wall, or it's caved in. What could do that? I don't know. But water's draining through the hole, pouring through.

We draw level, and I use an oar to brace us, stop us sliding through till I know.

I shine the torch through the hole.

Water slides down in a low black gleaming slope, into a deep pool-no, not a pool, a small lake, on the floor of a great big fucking cavern.

I let out a shout. There are yells down the tunnel; the kids, startled.

"Paul," says Jean.

"Sorry." I shine the beam around. A big chamber. A natural cavern. A high ceiling. Stalactites. Stalagmites. And around the pool, a shore of crumbled stone. Dry land. A place to rest.

"Is it safe?" asks Jean.

I laugh. "God knows," I tell her. "What's safe?" I turn back to the others. "Through here," I call.

We pull the boats onto the blessed dry land and stumble on up, legs weak and shaky. A couple of the younger kids, deathly tired, have to be carried ashore.

We sit and take stock. Frank Emerson stares at the clinker on the ground and grubs through it, picks up a lump of something black and brittle. A grin spreads across his cadaverous face; not a pleasant sight.

"What?" I ask.

He grins the wider. "Coal!"

Of course. We grub together a heap of it. Thank God for my lighter. Anya used to nag me about my smoking, but thank God for it now.

What'll we do, I wonder, when its fuel is all gone?

The fire smoulders into life and we switch off the torches as a little puddle of heat and light spreads and gathers round.

We're all tired. Time to sleep. No strength to consider what other dangers there might be down here. If we don't wake up, so be it. We're too tired to care now, after all we've been through.

We have no blankets. I'm shivering-of course, we all were standing in that water-God, so cold. How have I held out this long? I'm lucky to still be alive. Thank God for the coal heat.

We huddle together for warmth as we sleep. Jean on one side of me, one of the younger boys on the other. Yesterday I'd've run a mile before being in this kind of proximity to one of the kids. Inappropriate contact. Now it's irrelevant; now it's about survival.

Anya, I think, and then, thank God, I drift off to sleep before I can think anymore.

I dream of fire. A room of fire. In the middle of it, a table. Anya sips coffee there, putting another cup in front of me.

"Thanks," I say.

"It's alright."

"No, I mean it. Specially with you being dead and all."

She snorts and flaps a hand, the way she always used to when she thought I was being silly. She keeps the left side of her face turned to me. The right side is eyeless and black, charcoal, the skull beneath half-bared. Grins at me whenever she turns without thinking. "Are you alright, Paul?"

"I think so. Relatively speaking."

"Relatively speaking."

"Well, you're dead."

"Don't go on about it."

"And the world's ended."

"Don't be so dramatic. The world's still there. It's just the people that are gone."