Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

She opened more and more sound files. They all appeared identical— masses of noise, black blots on the screen.

All of the recordings were gone. All of the sounds, eclipsed by a single shout. A shriek. A scream.

“No,” she whimpered. “Please. Anything but this.”

She staggered backwards. The loss of the recordings felt like grief.

She remembered how the sound had approached as she had stood on the shore of the island. A phrase from the day before echoed in her mind.

… across the seas, from Greenland all the way back to here…

She thought of Sighna, the Inuit guide, his hands clamped over his ears.

She thought of Eqalussuaq, its jaws wide. Its silent scream, back then. Its shriek, on the recordings.

Whatever she had picked up on her microphone, it hadn’t been a sound, not in the usual sense. It was something else. Something that she had trapped, or that had—what was the word? Hidden? No… burrowed. Torn and ripped and burrowed, hiding itself within her recordings.

And she had brought it home.

The bookshelf speakers began to rock. Lea shuddered. She could still hear the sound, though only faintly. She pulled the plug from the wall. The sound only grew in intensity.

Anger.

She felt an icy chill all over her body. The sound grew and grew and grew, dizzying, nauseating. It no longer came from the speakers. It seemed to be emitted by the walls, the air, her own skin.

“Stop!” she shouted. “Whatever you are, stop! Leave me alone!” Another phrase, the same one she had used when she had first encountered Eqalussuaq, pressed at her. “Not me!”

The scream stopped.

Lea waited. The calm felt like deafness. Tentatively, she plugged in the speakers and turned them on. Nothing.

Safe and sound.

With shaking hands, she booted the computer, then scrolled down to the first recordings of that final day in the sea. She selected the first file. A low, warm, creaking sound came from the speakers. The song of the iceberg had returned, pristine and ethereal, its wheezing groan continuing without interruption. No screaming, no anger.

She selected another recording made that same morning, then another. All were unimpaired, the clean, clear sounds matching the smooth waveforms on the screen.

Breathless, she gathered recordings together in the sound editor, overlaying and overlapping them, until the orchestra of soft moaning sounds grew into a single, overwhelming, glorious song. Bubbles rose around her. She felt warmth despite the chill. She danced slowly as if underwater.

Only one unwanted, alien sound penetrated through. Lea finally registered Peter’s complaints from upstairs.

As she entered his bedroom, her son reached up blindly with both hands.

“It’s okay,” Lea said, rocking him against her chest. “It’s gone.”

Peter said nothing. Tears trickled down his cheeks, making twin spots on her pyjamas. His open mouth worked from side to side. Lea remembered making the same motion herself, as the plane touched down and she tried to restore her hearing.

“Stop shouting,” Peter murmured.

Lea frowned. Was he dreaming?

But then he looked directly at her. His voice sounded far away. “It hurts so much, Mum. Make it stop.”

She watched him writhe, his hands pressed against his ears and his face pushed into the pillow. She felt a sudden certainty that it wouldn’t help.

Peter’s body was slack in her arms as she made her way downstairs. She stood holding him, before her computer, watching the undulating shapes of the waveforms on the screen. The iceberg recordings continued playing. Warm and heavenly.

She hesitated for several moments before laying Peter down on the battered studio sofa. Her hands wavered over the computer keyboard.

Peter’s mouth contorted with pain, a thin white line pressed tight as if withholding something trying to force its way out.

It felt like a choice. Save the recordings, or Peter. Eqalussuaq was demanding that she choose.

She understood that her hesitation was unforgivable. She understood that she would spend her life attempting to rationalise the fact that she had even considered the alternative.

She looked at her son.

She chose.

14Sep16 . Select all.

She wept a little.

Delete.

Peter whimpered as Lea smoothed his hair, then pressed his head further into the sofa cushion. His body shivered and shook. Clearly, he was still in agony.

She yanked out the plug to the computer and clawed at its case.

In the lean-to beyond the kitchen she found a hammer and chisel. As she cracked through the casing of the computer she shouted and wailed, a sound almost as feral as the scream on the recordings. The chisel revealed the internal hard drive, then fractured it. Once it was in pieces Lea turned her attention to the portable drives. In her desperation she shattered them all.

If anything, Peter appeared to be suffering even more now. His knees pulled up to his chin. As he rocked back and forth, his entire body spasmed.

Then his white lips trembled. They parted, showing his teeth.

The scream of whatever had followed Lea from the Arctic burst forth. Peter’s head rattled from side to side with the effort of restraining himself against the force of the sound.

Lea gripped his hands. She pleaded.

But she understood. Destroying the recordings wasn’t all that Eqalussuaq demanded.

“It’s not him you want,” she said in a whisper. “It’s me.”

Peter’s eyes opened.

Lea gripped the wooden arm of the sofa.

It hit her. Creaking limbs, something bellowing, screams that knifed through the water.

She clamped her hands over her ears, without any effect. The shriek took swipes at her head and torso, threatening to send her toppling. Her body convulsed with the cold.

Peter recovered within hours.

Lea’s tinnitus would be permanent, the doctor said, though over time it transitioned from excruciating to deafening to a persistent, wavering drone.

She stood on the rock outcrop at dusk, facing out to sea. She watched a flock of gulls, concentrating on the shifting shapes that they formed, at first a ribbon, then a fat arrow, then a winding river.

She stretched her body upwards, tracking the flock, then winced at a pain in her stomach. She pulled her cardigan and T-shirt up. The thing had left her, but it had also left its mark. If it had ever been a real wound, one might have said it was healing fast. It was clear that the scar would remain, though—a single line of ripped, raw, pink flesh that corkscrewed around her abdomen.

A wave curled into existence and bundled itself towards the shore. Once she might have worn her binaural microphones to capture the sounds of the wind and waves, but the ringing in her ears interfered with the recordings. Now the sounds of the island served only as a temporary mask over the hisses and shrieks.

Above her, for a few seconds, the flock of birds formed a new shape— something sinewy and snub-nosed. It flexed and flicked its tail as it swam across the darkening sky.

TEN YEARS AGO, SARAH FIORE’S LOST IN THE DARK TERRIFIED AUDIENCES. NOW, ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE MOVIE’S RELEASE, ITS DIRECTOR HAS REVEALED NEW INFORMATION ABOUT THE CIRCUMSTANCES BEHIND ITS FILMING. JOHN LANGAN REPORTS.

Pete’s Corner Pub, in the Hudson Valley town of Huguenot, is a familiar college-town location: the student bar, at whose door aspiring underage patrons test their fake id’s against the bouncers’ scrutiny, and inside which every square inch is occupied by men and women shouting to be heard over the sound system’s blare. Its floor is scuffed, its wooden tables and benches scored with generations of initials and symbols. More students than you could easily count have passed their Friday and Saturday nights here, their weekend dramas fueled by surging hormones and pitchers of cheap beer.