Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

“Not me! Take her!”

Abruptly, a squall of sound shrieked through the headphones. Lea spasmed and one arm knocked the glass from the worktop, spraying red wine onto the screen. She ripped the headphones from her ears.

Onscreen, the open jaws of the shark shuddered, as if the shriek came from within.

What was that? Instinctively, she glanced at the waveform. Its shape was smoothly bulbous, without peaks.

She bent the headphone cup to listen with one ear. The shriek began again, even louder than before. Even with the amp dialled down, she could hardly bear to hear it. Now she could make out a guttural growl beneath the shrill static.

She flung the headphones down again.

Onscreen, silent, the shark turned. Now it faced the camera full on.

Perhaps Reeta wasn’t so brave, after all. At the moment that it was clear that Eqalussuaq was accelerating towards her, she let go of the camera. The blue light of the screen flashed bright and dark, bright and dark, as the camera spun and dropped down, down, down.

Upstairs, Peter began to howl.

She slept badly, imagining herself in the depths along with the abandoned camera. Something was down there with her, sinuous and sleek. It was a bad joke, she thought when she woke. Eqalussuaq, of the family Somniosidae. Sleeper shark .

The bulky headphones comforted her. As she strode towards the island’s coast, she listened to the live recording stream from the binaural microphones fixed to the exterior of the earphone cups. Her footsteps redoubled in her ears, lagging fractionally behind the real world, as if following her.

Lindisfarne could be defined by its sounds. The wind tumbling from the sea and up the rock outcrops. The cries of the gulls and the whip of their wings. The dense, tactile calm within the oasis of the priory ruins. Captured and suitably arranged, it all belonged to Lea.

Her pace quickened as she headed through the sand dunes to the pebble beach, putting distance between herself and home. The Arctic recordings weren’t scheduled to be delivered to Nils for another week, after Reeta’s funeral, and indexing the sound files would involve only a handful of hours of work. That morning, when she had returned from delivering Peter to school, she had lingered in front of the computer, unable to bring herself to boot it up. Eqalussuaq’s shriek had still echoed in her ears.

She had decided to distract herself by concentrating on other projects. Her record label had shown only muted interest in her proposal of manipulated ambient recordings from Lindisfarne, but they hadn’t heard even the raw audio yet. Following post-production work in the studio, the tracks could be wonderful.

She was still crouching beside an abandoned boat, leaning in with the binaural mics to capture its dull scrape against the pebbles, when she noted the time. All those weeks away from home had left her insensitive to the timing of the tides. She would have to rush to make it across the causeway and back before the sea made it impassable.

As she turned from the shore a faint sound registered in her headphones. She turned to the boat again. Had its hull made that screech? She turned her head from side to side to locate the direction. It was coming from somewhere out at sea. Shrill. As the high-pitched noise grew in volume, she heard a deep grumble beneath, and she thought of icebergs. She stared out at the water, half-expecting to see a disturbance, something cutting through the waves as it approached.

Nothing. At least, nothing visible.

But the volume increased, all the same. The screech and roar became more insistent. Louder.

Angrier.

After another ten seconds she could no longer bear the shrieking. She pulled off the headphones and sprinted back towards the dunes.

Lea sat opposite Peter at the melamine table. He hadn’t touched his burger. There were dark shadows beneath his eyes. After the awkwardness of the apology to Daphne and her parents at the school gates, Lea had brought him to a McDonald’s in Berwick, but her desperation to maintain the pretence that it was a treat was wearing thin. Peter was a smart six-year-old. He understood that her delay on the island, and the high tide that now covered the Lindisfarne causeway, meant an enforced wait of four hours before they could return home.

“What if you’d got lost when you were away?” Peter said.

Lea flinched. Once again, she imagined herself freezing in Baffin Bay. If she’d found herself trapped down there, would she have prayed for Peter or would her final thoughts have been of her precious recordings?

“I had maps and people to show me around,” she said. She noted the petulance in her own voice.

“But you were far, far away.”

“Eat your food.”

Peter pushed away the greasy container. “Daphne said you weren’t coming back.”

“And that’s why you bit her?”

“I bit her because she’s a bitch.”

Lea sprung from her seat. “Don’t you dare use that kind of language!” She hovered beside him. What was she going to do, hit him?

Peter slumped further into his chair.

Lea sighed. It was fruitless to wonder where he’d learnt the word. She had no idea how he’d been living for the last three months. She would never have thought him capable of running away from home.

“Look,” she said, “I was far away, you’re right. But I found my way back to you, didn’t I?”

Peter’s sullen expression changed to one of quiet hope. “Like I’ve got a homing beacon? So you can always find me?”

“Exactly. I zoomed across the seas, from Greenland all the way back to here. And I won’t leave you again.” Instantly, she regretted the last part.

That night, after Peter had bathed, he insisted that Lea bring the portable radio into his bedroom. Karen, it transpired, had taken to leaving a radio on low volume, following a phase of interrupted sleep. The mutter of Radio 4 voices was unintelligible but soothing nonetheless, despite the static that wouldn’t quite abate, no matter where Lea tuned the dial.

Shadows in the depths. Smooth skin and sharp points.

Lea woke in a panic.

That shriek again. It pulsated, echoing around the walls and in her head.

She burst into the corridor and down the stairs. Behind her, Peter’s shouts mingled with the scream that seemed to come from everywhere at once.

The shrill sound was even louder as she neared her studio at the back of the house. She staggered with the pressure of it as she entered the room. The huge bookshelf speakers emitted waves of piercing white noise.

Lea lunged up at them. Once they were turned off, her body slumped in delayed shock.

She ignored Peter’s wails. In the kitchen she turned on the radio, then flicked it off as the squealing sound began again. The TV in the lounge gave the same result, though the picture was unaffected.

It was everywhere.

With shaking hands, she booted up the computer. She opened one of the iceberg sound recordings at random.

She saw what had happened immediately. Instead of a smooth waveform, the sound editor showed a single block of black, with only occasional slices missing, like shards calved from an iceberg. Tentatively, she lifted the headphones and pressed play. The scream was unbearable, even with the headphones held at arm’s length. The plastic buzzed and shook with the force of the sound.