James Jenkins - The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories. Volume 1

‘I’ll go first and pull you onto the other side,’ Petri said. ‘Like a midwife, right?’

‘Okay.’

‘You’ll come right behind me. Do you understand?’

The screeching sound was closer now.

‘Do you understand?’ Petri yelled.

‘Okay.’

Young, beautiful Nina.

Petri pulled her towards the hole and squatted beside it. He put his arms against his sides and dove.

‘What is that?’ Nina asked somewhere behind him.

Petri pushed himself deeper into the hole.

What is that?

Nina’s shouts were dimmer now, as if muffled by cotton. Petri sped up, let his body twist and turn instinctively, allowed it to remember what it was like to be a fish or a snake.

When the constricting feeling started, Petri remembered what Alex had said: just back up a few centimeters and try again, changing your position a little. But Alex was a nutcase and a foreign perv who used Mel Gibson as his example. Nina was still in the cave, seeing something she didn’t understand. Petri’s heartbeat was ringing in his ears.

And so he kept pushing forward. Pushed even when he realized that his body didn’t remember what being a fish or a snake felt like. Pushed because the fat Chinese man had gotten through, pushed until he was completely stuck.

Petri remained sensible about the situation, even when he realized he was screaming. He tried to move, although the stone squeezed his upper body harder and harder. His body tried to fix the situation with instinctive movements. Stupid, unnecessary, dangerous movements, constantly growing more violent. The beam of his headlamp swayed everywhere, but there was nothing but darkness there.

He heard a crunch.

Pain flooded through his left arm. All sensation of other limbs disappeared.

Petri screamed louder. The scream filled his head. It was a small space, his head. Small like the space he was in.

He had to think reasonably, but reason told him that some big bone had just broken and that the spot would soon start to swell.

Swell and swell like a fat Chinese man.

Petri jerked his head from side to side, the only thing he was still capable of moving. His headlamp hit the wall and went out.

Swell and swell and—

Reason told him that everyone had gotten through this hole, and that everyone got to the surface and sent pictures to their friends and said that the experience was earth-­shattering, but never again.

Swell and—

Dark and tight and dark.

This can’t be happening, Petri thought, in some calm corner of his mind. The world is not this evil.

Not dark; darkness.

The point at which a fat Chinese man swells beyond all comprehensible limits.

Swells, and then, something pushing out, black sh—

Darkness comes.

The worst possible.

The darkness of a fat Chinese man.

—it.

Completely stuck.

Completely stuck and, in the darkness, it was difficult to say when he was conscious and when not. Sometimes, Petri fell through an endless space, sometimes nothing but choking pressure all around him, like sweaty skin.

Sometimes, he fell asleep.

Petri was in his childhood, in a movie theater. The scent of the red fitted carpet. The white screen glowed in the shadows. The breath of something huge snuffled and wheezed in the back row. Smacking sounds, like something was eating with great relish. Petri covered his ears with his hands and looked at the movie screen; it was like uneven glass, and there was night behind it and, in the night, flickering naked people or white reptiles in muddy water.

Petri forced his eyes closed, but in real life, he did the opposite. His eyes were open, he was conscious again and still helplessly stuck.

Petri started to scream and swing his head. No mercy; head against stone until it all fades away.

And finally it did.

Evening sun shining through the open balcony doors in some little Portuguese town, the name of which Petri couldn’t remember. The balcony doors had wooden blinds; one of them was open. The sun was setting behind the mountains.

Nina’s hair against the white pillow.

Look how beautiful , Petri said.

Nina didn’t answer him. Petri took the girl by the shoulder and turned her around.

Her face was covered by hair. Petri moved it aside but could not find Nina’s face. The hair would not end. Just when he thought he could see a glimpse of an eye or the tip of her nose, more hair appeared. The hair went on and on, tangled around his fingers, wrapped tightly around them, and there was something between all that hair, not eyes or tips of noses, but . . .

Small mouths angry rat mouths.

They greedily attacked the fingers tangled in hair, like this had been the plan from the very start, when Nina, whose name Petri did not yet know, had walked across that room at that party, so young and so beautiful and so sudden that everything changed, like waking up from a dream.

And Petri woke up.

He didn’t scream this time. His shoulder was numb, but he felt something touching his feet. Petri held his breath and focused on the sensation like it was a quiet sound he was trying to listen for.

Fingers were exploring his toes. He could feel the tickles clearly. It was almost a pleasant feeling. The world was good, after all. The fingers separated his toes patiently, gently. Like an ape grooming its mate or a parent caressing the feet of their child.

When the pain came, it wasn’t even that bad, all things considered.

It still left him unconscious.

Petri remembered the school festival at the end of first grade. He hadn’t seen his father and mother anywhere. After the festival, he had run out and stood in the schoolyard, thinking that something bad had happened, that the world wanted to hurt him. The details of it remained hidden, like the details of some hostile, hiding, curled-­up creature. Then his father and mother had stepped through the school doors. Familiar faces and smiles, and they asked why Petri had just run past them.

Petri couldn’t explain. Maybe he had wanted to see the world as it was, without his father and mother, catch the world in the act before it curled up and hid.

Petri kept repeating the memory, absent-­mindedly certain that it was something crucial, something he could not quite catch. Again and again, he focused on the moment in the empty schoolyard, when something had curled up to hide, had run underneath the bathroom door when he had flipped on the light.

Petri realized that his skin was free.

He was the cockroach that had gotten away.

Petri lifted his head. The motion felt like a luxury. To be allowed to move like that.

Only the skin of his back was touching stone. The darkness was still complete, but the tightness was gone.

Petri suspected that he was sleeping. The world wanted to hurt him, and it would not let go that easily.

He felt out his left shoulder. It was dislocated and broken. The pain was real. Petri pushed himself to sit up and groped at the ground around him. His hands touched fabric. His fingers explored the object until Petri realized that it was a backpack. Opening it one-­handed was difficult. Inside, he felt the plastic shape of a cellphone.

A lucky cockroach, indeed.

When the screen woke up, it shone like the sun. It filled the cave. Petri hooted with joy and looked around. He saw the handprints covering the wall, the clothes on the ground. A miracle had happened. Petri did not understand how, but he accepted it. He illuminated the old cave, his old skin, the old childhood scar on his knee.

And his toes.

His legs were at the mouth of the passage leading to the last cave. Behind them, there was a darkness that the light could not reach.