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

I wonder if Jean sees Alan.

Our fragile, glass-brittle equilibrium, such as it is, shatters for good and all the next day.

At first it looks lucky. A dead bream bobs in the shallows when we wake, wafts to shore. An easy breakfast.

It's only later that Frank takes my arm.

"Paul, we've got a problem."

"What's that?"

For answer, he picks up the Geiger counter and walks towards the shore. I look round. Jean and the remaining ten children are further down, towards the top end of the cavern. We're up near the narrows; everyone else is, understandably, giving them the widest possible berth.

Frank switches the microphone on. A moment later, the Geiger counter begins to crackle and tick. Before he switches it off, it's risen almost to a screech.

"It's bad, isn't it?" I ask. Foolishly.

"You know it is." Frank nods towards the breach in the tunnel wall, the one we came through. "The radiation's seeping down here."

I sag. This doesn't end. It just doesn't end. "Oh shit."

"Yeah. Yeah."

"What can we do?"

"Get away from it," Frank says, simply. "Go deeper in. It's the only way."

I turn and look unwillingly at the narrows.

"Look-Paul. I know it's freaky in there. But if we just keep going-"

"Are you mad?"

"No. Look-most of the disorientation was about trying to find your way back. We won't be. We can survive: we know there's water in the narrows."

Water and what else, Frank? Low, crude houses? White things that flop and grunt and hiss in the water?

"We don't know where any of them go anyway," he says. "So we can't get lost as such. It's as good a chance as any of finding somewhere safer."

"What about… " I point back towards the breach in the wall. "We could head on down the canal."

"And go where?"

I shrug. "We don't know what else could be there. Might be something better than this place. And whatever you say about that-" I point at the narrows "-I don't want to go back in there. I know-" he opens his mouth "-it's not about what I want. But it's bad in there, Frank. You talk about it but you don't know what it's like."

"I've got an inkling," he said. "I heard what Jason said, like everyone else."

"That stuff, about the houses… "

He spreads his hands. "Let's not go there, mate."

"But that's the point. We'll have to."

"Alright. Maybe the houses were real. Maybe some people got trapped down here back in the day one time and had to rough it, or they were used for storage. Or something. Doesn't mean they've got something out of a midnight movie living in them."

I find myself wishing he hadn't put it into words. "I don't like the idea of putting the kids in there."

"I know." He chews his lip.

"If we tried the canal," I say, "at least we'd know where the hell we were."

"Yeah. Yeah."

In the end, a compromise is reached. Frank and two of the older boys-volunteers, one of whom is Jason Stanton, unsurprisingly up for anything that poses an alternative to the narrows-will head down the canal in one of the boats. I can see why Frank's reluctant-we spent hours-even days, it felt like-heading down the canal before we found the cavern, and that was sheer luck. By the time we give up and turn back, the radiation might've seeped so far down we can't get to the narrows at all.

But that's no loss to me; Frank doesn't understand. He can't. He hasn't been in there.

They row the boat off. Jean and I stay with the rest of the children and the Geiger counter. Frank told me what to look for. When the radiation gets too high, keep moving away from the water's edge, and if you have to, head into the narrows.

I'll die first, I think.

The plash of oars recedes. Long silence falls. Jean sits beside me. We haven't spoken since we fucked last night. Don't know what to say to each other. I try to pretend it didn't happen. I saw Anya while I fucked her. I'll call it a dream. In this blurred twilight place that comes easy.

"Do you think they'll find anything?" she asks at last. Perhaps she's made the same decision as me.

"I hope so." But I doubt it. It's almost as if Frank wants to go into the narrows. Maybe he does, because he never has; he wants to experience it for himself.

That's crazy, I tell myself. But we'd all be crazy not to be crazy, in one way or another, down here. I know my own madness pretty damn well by now. But Frank's? He seems so together, so calm and controlled. But that could only make him the craziest one of all, just waiting to-

Then the screaming starts.

Jason. I know that voice. Howling, pleas and promises and threats. "No! No! Please! I'll-no! You fucker, I'll kill y-"

And Frank screams too, and the other boy. Terror or rage, I can't tell.

The water thrashing and churning. Who's fighting who, or what?

At last, silence falls.

Much later, a broken oar drifts over the lip of the breach and bobs slowly across the lake to the shore. I pick it up. Its blade is smudged red, and cracked.

After a time, I remember to switch on the Geiger counter.

The screech is piercing. I turn it off. But they're all looking at me now. All but the youngest kids understand what it means.

Jean looks to me for a lead. No help, no decision there. Once again, it's all down to me.

"Alright," I say. "Now. Whatever happens, you stay close to me. Hang on to the person in front of you. Do not stop unless everyone else does. Understand?"

"Yes, Mr Forrester."

I meet Jean's eyes. She's pale, close to welling up.

Torches, batteries. No food. There isn't any. We've brought what coal we can, stuffed in our pockets, tied up in an old jacket.

I flick the torch into the mouth of one of the narrows, and then another. Where do you start? Which do you pick? It's all terra incognita.

In the end, I pick the longest narrow in sight. It extends a good fifty yards without a bend. This one.

"Alright," I say. "Let's go."

We start down it, torches shining ahead. A small hand is hooked into the back of my belt. It's the same all the way down the line.

I'll die first. That's what I thought. But-what was it pushed me on? The same refusal to die that drove me down here? Or was that what it was, after all? Was it something else? Did something call me down here, lead me into this? A secret love of the dark, a curiosity about places like this? If so, the narrows are the logical conclusion. Was it really a struggle to avoid going back in or a struggle against what kept me out?

Everything's coming apart; even my own motivations. I can't be sure what I want anymore, who I am, what makes me tick.

Or maybe it was simpler. Maybe I could've faced dying, but the kids-the kids and Jean-I know enough about radiation sickness, read and seen enough to know it's a bad death, maybe the worst. Could I have even put myself through it? In the end I couldn't put the children through it. Couldn't watch them die like that because of me.

Or… I just don't know anymore. It feels as if everything's been pushing us-me-towards the narrows. The radiation, whatever happened to Frank. Sooner or later, I had to give way.

What

did happen to Frank and the others? Something in the water? Something like what Jason heard in the narrows? Or did Frank decide it was a non-starter? Was the tunnel blocked further down? Was he going to turn back and the fight was between him and Jason?

We'll never know. No-one was going to chance trying it again. Maybe we should have.

Too late now.

"Paul?"

"What?" I snap out of the reverie. Snap being the operative word. I look back. Jean, scared face above a line of others like hers.

"I-sorry-Paul. If we go any further we'll be out of sight of the cavern."

She's right. We're about at the first bend. When we round that, the real narrows begin.