Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

“A similar process happens all over the country—all over the world. Something bad happens, and it hardens into the seed for stories about a monstrous character. This was what Isabelle’s dissertation director said. There was nothing unusual about the woman in the mine, as the local kids called her. Isabelle disagreed, said she had additional information that distinguished this narrative from the rest. Once again, it involved her uncle, Rich, the cop.

“Ten years to the date after he answered his first call about the mine, he received a second. A group of high school seniors had been partying outside the entrance, and one of them had gone into it on a dare. That was three hours ago, and there had been no sign of him since. A couple of the other kids started in after their missing friend, but could find no trace of him as far as they dared to go. Everybody panicked, and eventually someone who was sober enough drove home and phoned the police. The Huguenot cops were busy with a costume party at one of the university’s dorms that had gotten out of hand when someone spiked the punch with acid, so the call was booted to the state troopers. Rich suspected a Halloween prank, probably by the missing kid on his friends, possibly by all the kids on the cops. Despite that, he drove to the access road and made his way on foot to the spot.

“There, he encountered a dozen teenagers, all of them more or less sober, so sick with worry he decided they must be telling the truth. Flashlight in hand, he set off into the mine to search for their friend. He wasn’t nervous, he told Isabelle. Sure, he remembered the bodies of the men he’d discovered a decade before, but he’d seen a lot worse than that in the meantime. The dark had never bothered him, nor did the thought of being underground. He was more concerned about the debris littering the floor: rocks of varying sizes, dusty boxes, rusted bits of old machines, the occasional tool. His feet crushed fast food containers, kicked the bones of small animals, clanged on an empty metal lunchbox. There was one good thing about the clutter—it allowed him to track the missing student without much difficulty.

“He came across graffiti farther inside the mine than he would have expected. He read names of people, sports teams, bands. He saw hearts encasing the names of lovers, peace symbols, even the anarchist A. He stumbled through a heap of beer cans, whose musical clatter wasn’t as comforting as he would have liked. Finally, he came upon the portrait.”

“Portrait?” Edie says.

“A woman’s face,” Sarah says, “done in charcoal on a patch of rock about head level. Whoever she was, Rich said, she was striking. Long black hair, high, strong cheekbones, full lips. Her left eye had been smeared, which made it look like a hole into her skull. The artist had given the picture a force, a vitality Rich struggled to define. He said it was as if she were two seconds away from stepping right out of the rock.

“By this point, he was pretty far in. Any sounds of the high school students had long since ceased. He was grudgingly impressed that the kid had traveled this distance. On the right, the tunnel he’d been walking opened on a shallow chamber. He swept his light across it, and stopped. There was a bed in there, its metal frame spotted orange with rust from the damp, its mattress black with mold. Lying half on the bed was a long piece of clothing—a straightjacket. He entered the room, lifted the restraint to check it. Mold blotched the material. What wasn’t mold was covered in writing, in symbols. He saw rows of crosses, stars of David, crescent moons, other figures he didn’t recognize, but assumed were religious, too. He held up the straightjacket, passed the light over it. The right front side and sleeve were stained with what he was certain was blood. He replaced the garment on the bed, and heard a footstep behind him.

“It was some kind of miracle, Rich said, he didn’t spin around gun in hand and shoot whoever was there, or at least brain them with his flashlight. Of course it was the missing student, who’d gotten himself good and lost in the mine’s recesses and had only come upon Rich through dumb luck. ‘Why didn’t you call for help?’ he asked the kid. Because there was someone else down there, the kid said. A woman. He’d seen her at the other end of one of the tunnels, right before the torch he was carrying guttered out. There was something wrong with her face, and when she saw him, her expression made him turn and run as fast as he could. The student couldn’t say how long he’d been hiding, listening. He’d thought Rich was her , and had debated fleeing further into the mine before she saw him. Now that he’d found Rich, it was imperative the two of them exit this place without delay.

“Had he heard the kid’s story outside, Rich told Isabelle, beside the fire he and his friends had built, he would have taken the tale with a block of salt. This far into the mine, the only source of light his flashlight, facing the stone cell with the weird straightjacket, the tale sounded less incredible. The student was all for bolting for the entrance, which Rich nixed. They needed to pay attention to their surroundings, he said, or the kid would find himself lost again, and he didn’t want that, did he? ‘No way,’ the kid said.

“The walk back to the surface took a long time. Rich did his best to remain calm, not let the student’s hysteria affect him, but there was a stretch of tunnel, about halfway to the exit, in which he was suddenly certain he and the kid were not alone. The hair on the back of his neck lifted, and his mouth went dry. For fear of spooking the student, he didn’t want to stop, but the echo of their feet on the walls made it difficult to decide if the sound he thought he was hearing, a whispering noise, like fabric swishing over rock, was more than his imagination. He didn’t want to put his hand on his gun, either, though the spot between his shoulders itched, as if something was stalking him and the kid, just a handful of footsteps behind them in the dark. The kid picked up on it, too, and asked him if there was someone else there with them, if she had found them. Rich heard the panic rising in the student’s voice and said no, it was only the two of them. If the kid suspected him of lying, he didn’t say anything.

“At last—at long last, Rich walked the student out of the mine and into the waiting arms of his friends, who were overjoyed at their reappearance. It was all he could do, Rich said, not to look back into the mine. He was afraid he’d see a woman standing inside it, something terribly wrong with her face.”

There’s a moment of silence, during which both Kristi and Ben fidget. Finally, Edie says, “That’s… incredible.”

“Isabelle thought so,” Sarah says. “A couple of years after that, the stories about the woman in the mine gained a new detail: the left side of her face was scarred. Whether the student Rich had retrieved told his story, or other kids ventured into the mine and discovered the drawing he’d seen, that became part of the description. It didn’t hurt that the first Nightmare on Elm Street was released around then, with its disfigured villain. The point is, there was something interesting going on, and Isabelle already had enough information to justify further research and analysis. She told me she was planning to make the woman in the mine the center of her dissertation, an instance of the way traditional folk story was affected by the presence and pressure of newer narrative forms. The professor overseeing the project disagreed. She more than disagreed, she told Isabelle her idea was a non-starter. Instead, she wanted Isabelle to go south, to Kentucky, where there were reports of a lizard monster that had been spotted during a local disturbance at the end of the sixties. It wasn’t that Isabelle wasn’t interested in the lizard monster, but she had done a lot of work on the other topic, and she didn’t want to drop it. Her professor’s attitude left her unsure what to do, scrap what she had and start over, or look for another director who would be more agreeable to her plans. Either way, she was watching the completion of her dissertation recede into the future. Which happens, but is still a bummer.