Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

I returned the rental car to the nearest return lot and took a different car home. I drove without music, only my thoughts streaming through my head, dark and churning and winding their way to an ocean of reality. I could not remove from my mind the glowing figure with its crown pointing to the stars and its impossible parody of Christ walking on the Sea of Galilee. I could not shake off Ted’s smile and the sensation of his touch on the back of my shoulder. This was something larger than any one man could comprehend, too fantastic to be believed. I would be laughed out of every PhD review hearing and torn to shreds in a culture awash in skepticism. My story would be discarded as either the rantings of a lunatic or lies by an attention-seeking folklorist in an age of racial strife. My story, though I had lived it, would be banished to fiction.

Those people had my address, my phone number, email, and even my credit card number. But they didn’t need to kill me. If I spoke I’d be relegated to the swampy backwaters of society like old Thomas Jeery, a man to be laughed at and ridiculed, left to die in a trailer park.

I did not stop.

I did not sleep.

I drove through the night till I reached the safety of my apartment.

I sat down and erased my dissertation, and in the darkness began a new work that would surely be called fiction by all those who could not and would not ever see: I left the university campus behind to do field work in the Deep South…

As Lea had predicted, Peter threw a tantrum the instant he opened the front door to find her standing on the step. As she scooped him into her arms, he shuddered against her. She had imagined that he would be taller, visibly older, in the twelve weeks that had passed. If anything, he seemed to have become lighter.

“Don’t fret, now,” she said. “Mum’s back.”

Peter buried his face into her shoulder, depositing mucus onto her cardigan. More like a newborn than a six-year-old. His blond hair had begun to sneak over the tips of his ears.

With her usual tact, Lea’s friend Karen had already stepped soundlessly into the lounge, leaving mother and son to their reunion. Lea closed the front door with her hip and entered Karen’s house. Peter regained his calm but still said nothing. He wriggled free of Lea’s embrace to sit close beside Karen on the sofa. Anyone might have assumed she was his mother, not Lea.

“So. Tell me,” Lea said.

Karen wrinkled her nose. “I won’t lie. It was tougher this time. But we had our fair share of fun. Didn’t we?” She rubbed Peter’s head, but he shrugged her away in order to glare at Lea.

“And at school?”

“Worse. More biting. Poor Daphne’s parents said they’ll call.”

Lea winced. Stains marked Peter’s cheeks, though he wasn’t crying. Old tears.

“Peter, listen,” she said, “What did we agree, before I left? About how you treat other children?”

Peter only shook his head. Based on past experience, it would take days for him to thaw. Until then, he would be impenetrable. An iceberg.

“That’s not all,” Karen said. “I couldn’t think how to tell you by email. Last week, Thursday, he ran away. I was frantic.” Her hands began to tremble. Lea glanced down and saw that her own hands shook a little, too. “The whole island helped me search for him. We found him in one of the refuge huts out on the causeway. He’d been trapped there for hours, Lea.”

A shudder ran through Lea’s body. She felt chill sting her skin, then seem to penetrate to her bones in an instant. “Thursday? The fourteenth?” she said, her jaw tight to stop her teeth chattering. “You’re sure?”

Karen shrugged. “Pretty sure.”

Lea examined her friend’s expression. There was concern there, but it was directed at Peter, rather than Lea herself. The news mustn’t have reached Britain yet. Or maybe the media didn’t judge the story as dramatic as it had seemed first-hand.

She glanced at Peter. What was the appropriate parental response to the news about his attempted escape from Lindisfarne? A mother ought to know, instinctively.

On the fourteenth of September, when she had slipped beneath the water—perhaps for the last time ever, she reflected now—the cold had seemed more absolute than it ought. She had felt a sudden shock of fear then, during that solo dive, easily comparable to the fear she experienced during the incident later that day. Perhaps it had been a response to danger back at home. Perhaps she had a maternal instinct, after all.

“You understand, don’t you?” Karen said. She was choosing her words carefully, too. Forcing herself not to scold Lea in front of her son. “He wasn’t trying to get away, so much as he was trying to get closer to what he wanted. He was trying to follow you.”

Lea made her excuses to Karen, with vague arrangements to meet later in the week. As she stepped over the threshold, Karen gripped her arm.

“I know it was an important trip for you,” she said. “I understand why you went. And it’s not that I mind having him here. You’re closer to me than my sister, and Peter’s like a son. But three whole months, Lea, and not a single phone call from you… I can’t do that again, okay? Not for a while.”

Lea nodded and shuffled into the street with her shivering child.

It was only when Peter had finally fallen asleep that Lea had the chance to check the contents of her duffel bag. She pushed aside the thick parka and dirty laundry to retrieve the hard black case beneath. Inside, six portable hard drives made a neat row. Throughout the journey, she had suffered from paranoia; all those weeks of work contained within something so easily lost. On the bumpy flight from Ilulissat she had woken shouting from a doze, certain that some atmospheric phenomenon had wiped the drives.

She booted her computer, slipped out the first drive, and ran a backup. She exhaled fully for the first time in days. Safe and sound.

When all of the backups had finished, she glanced towards the staircase. No sounds from Peter. Guiltily, she slipped on her headphones. If he yelled now, she wouldn’t hear it.

She selected a file at random and clicked play. A waveform appeared onscreen, reassuring in its dark fluidity. Her eyes narrowed as she concentrated on the skittering sound. Onscreen, a dark peak broke up and away, matching a corresponding sound in the headphones. She smiled. The call of a black-legged kittiwake. Her thighs had ached terribly after she had crouched for hours with her rifle mic pointed at the nest.

She chose another track. Instantly, her headphones filled with a burping, chuckling noise. She checked the filename against the handwritten description in her notebook. Earless harp seals, slithering on the ice as they huddled together.

She settled into the swivel chair, sipping wine as she browsed through the tracks. Her hands shook only a little now, the lingering fear subsiding. The tracks were all pristine. A month of good work.

The most recently-used drive was easily identifiable, as its surface was scuffed and scratched. When she had awoken in the hut on the fifteenth, she had insisted that it be found and brought to her immediately. When she had finally made herself understood to the Inuit guides who watched over her, and they had relayed the message to her colleagues, and the hard drive had been located, she had cursed at Nils for allowing it to be handled so roughly. The look on her producer’s face as he handed it over was easy to read. After what’s happened , his expression said, you’re worried about the work?