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

"But-"

"Just try it."

Muttering, she does. I start down the cave, stooped, flashing the torch side to side. This narrow and the second are about five yards apart, if that. A yard; that's about a pace for me. I count my steps: one, two, three, four… "Jean?"

"Paul?" Her voice is faint.

"Jean?" I shout a little. "Can you hear me?"

"Where are you?"

I shine the torch around. The walls are unbroken. I flash the beam ahead. "Can you see that?"

"See what?"

"The torch light. Is it coming through into your narrow?"

"No, it bloody isn't, Paul, and it's bloody dark out here. Will you come back now, please?"

"Okay." I feel a beading film of sweat on my forehead. The narrow looks straight and level but it must go under or over the neighbouring one. It's the only explanation.

I backtrack to the bend in the narrow. Shine the torch around-

This isn't right.

I left a long straight tunnel, with the main cavern at the end to my left, but where the main cavern and Jean ought to be there's just a flat wall of black and yellow stone, the narrow branching left and right. And to my right, where there was a dead end, the narrow now extends on for as far as I can see and there are very visible openings in it-two on the left and one on the right-where other narrows branch off.

Panic squirms low down in my belly. I turn back towards the T-junction. "Jean?" I shout, and I can't quite keep my voice level.

"Paul?"

It's coming from behind me, down the mysteriously extended narrow. "Jean!"

"What?" She sounds pissed off. "Where are you?"

Good question. "Jean, just keep shouting to me, alright? I'm sort of-lost here."

"Lost? How the hell are you-"

"Jean, just do it!" I yell. First time I've really lost it since we got down here. Since the bomb, in fact.

"Okay. Okay. Can you hear me?"

"Yes, just about. Keep talking."

"Talking? More like shouting."

"Just keep it up."

I head towards her voice. My hand is shaking on the torch.

"What should I say?"

"Anything. Sing if you want."

"Sing? I canna sing for toffee."

"It doesn't have to be tuneful."

She breaks into a halting rendition of "Scotland the Brave." I can see what she meant. At least it's not "You Canna Shove Yer Granny Aff the Bus." Small mercies again.

It rings in the narrow. I pass the first of the entrances on my left. When I reach the second, I realise her singing's coming from there.

There's no guarantee that sound's a reliable indicator of location, as everything else I'd normally rely on has gone screwy, but what else can I do? I start down this new narrow. It slopes steeply upward, but I follow it.

The singing gets louder. Water splashes around my ankles. Something white and blind wriggles past on its way down. I keep on climbing. The water flowing down this narrow is fast and cold and quite deep. Why didn't any of it spill out into the other, longer one I've left behind?

The singing stops. "Jean?" I shout.

"Alright, alright." I hear her coughing. Then she starts again, the

Mingulay Boat Song this time.

"Heel ya ho, boys, let her go, boys, sailing homewards to Mingulay… "

Where is Mingulay anyway? The Hebrides? Orkneys? Shetlands? I'm pretty sure it's an island of some kind anyway.

The singing's good and loud, at least. The narrow steepens till it's almost vertical. I clamp the torch between my teeth and use my hands to climb.

At last, I reach the top. Been climbing too long. Flat floor, water gushing across it, and I can hear Jean's voice, loud and clear, close to. I look up; the narrow has a mouth and water glistens beyond it. It opens out. I hear voices, too.

Someone shouts as the beam of my torch flashes from the narrow-mouth and I stumble out, almost falling headlong into the lake. Across the water on the bank, Jean and Frank and the others spin from the mouth of the narrow I entered and stare at me dumbfounded.

"No one goes in there," I say later, huddled round a fresh fire some way from the circle of children, sharing its warmth with Jean and Frank. "No one."

Frank looks at me doubtfully. "Paul, I know you've had a shock, but-"

"No buts," I say. "I didn't imagine what happened in there."

"Are you sure?" he asks gently.

I glare at him. "Frank-"

"Paul, all I'm saying is we've all been through a hell of a lot. You especially. You've been responsible for all of us. It'd be unbelievable if you didn't feel the strain somehow. And you have to keep everything so bottled up and reined in, it's not surprising if-"

"Are you a psychoanalyst now?" I know I'm overreacting, taking it out on Frank, but I can't stop myself. Luckily he seems to understand that too.

"No, Paul, I'm not. All I'm trying to say is this: stress, lack of sleep, grief, trauma, all those things, they can cause you to hallucinate. As can simply being underground, in the dark, in tunnels. I've been caving once or twice You'd be surprised what… look. All I mean is this. What you saw down there is physically impossible. Right?"

"I know that." I rub my face. "But I saw it."

"I'm not questioning that." I look up. "All I'm questioning is whether it was objectively real. Be honest. What's the most likely explanation? Either the tunnels really did shift and change around like you say, or you experienced a hallucination brought on by your emotional state and the conditions down here. And I don't doubt the narrows themselves could be disorientating too, once you got out of sight of the main cavern. You obviously lost your bearings and were lucky to find your way out again. But out of those two explanations, which makes more sense? Which is more probable? That's all I'm saying."

I bow my head. I have to admit he's right on that one. But that's what really frightens me. Because if you can't trust your own senses, the evidence of your own eyes, what can you trust?

In the cold light of day… I've had the occasional weird experience in my time, and most could be put down to hallucinations, like Frank says about this, or something more mundane. But it helps when you can get away from the place where you saw the weird thing or heard the weird sounds and go somewhere normal, four-square, the land of Starbucks and McDonald's, busy city streets and cars, brand names and day jobs. The cold light of day.

Except that it might still be cold back up there, but light? I think of all the predictions I heard and read, the nuclear winter, the great clouds of smoke and ash blotting out the sun and plunging the world into a new Ice Age. And even if we could get back up there, even forgetting that the radiation would kill us in hours, the world of Starbucks and McDonalds, busy city streets and brand names-it's all gone. The day job, the worries about bills and rent and mortgages, shopping at Morrisons or the local market- it's all gone. There is no normal anymore. The world is what's around us now, wherever we're clinging on to life a bit longer. The world is this cave. And reality… what's reality? Frank's right. We can't trust what we hear or see-with everything we've been through, it'd be a miracle if we didn't see or hear things that weren't there. And it isn't safe to be here. Nowhere is, anymore.

Panic wells up; I fight it down. I know that if I give into it once, that'll be it, nothing will ever make sense anymore and I'll either curl up catatonic or run screaming into the water till I drown to escape the knowledge, or not believe a real danger till it kills me or run to my death from an imaginary one.

So I push it down and instead I let myself realise the magnitude of our loss. Not just Anya, but Poland is gone. Not just the school, the village, Manchester and Salford, but Britain itself in any meaningful sense. America, too? Or-what if the bombs only fell on Manchester? If there weren't any others? It's impossible to say. And impossible to believe.