Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

Yes, I said, it would.

Even more unexpectedly, Isabelle Router agreed to talk. Once Lost in the Dark was done shooting, she and Sarah had an argument which resulted in a falling out that has lasted to this day. Isabelle returned to Albany, to work on her Ph.D. at the state university, only to leave after a single semester. For the next few years, she said, she was kind of messed up. She moved around a lot, did… things. Eventually, she pulled herself together, settled in Bolder, where she became a yoga instructor. She asked me if I had spoken with anyone else, and what they had said. Isabelle was particularly interested to know if I’d talked to Sarah. That I had been her teacher was of great interest; she wanted to know what Sarah had been like as a student. When it came to the question of the documentary, her answers grew vague. Yes, they had done some preliminary filming in the mine. In fact, they’d gotten kind of lost down there. Did I know that the idea for the movie, for all of the supernatural stuff, was hers? It came out of the research she’d been doing for her dissertation. You did shoot a documentary first, I said.

“I don’t know that I’d go that far,” Isabelle said. “We were just lost in the dark. Sarah got that much right.”

Nor could I coax any more definitive statement from her. There was enough in Isabelle’s words for me to take them as supporting Sarah’s claims, but not enough to settle the matter. Not to mention, the more I paged through the notes I’d taken from all of the interviews, the less certain I was that I wasn’t being played for a sucker. The extremity of Priya, Kristi, and George’s reactions—their theatricality—added to Fessenden’s bland non-answers and Isabelle’s ambiguous replies, seemed intended, scripted , to give the impression that not only had the documentary been filmed, it had recorded an experience singularly unpleasant. On the other hand, quite often, the truth looks glaringly untrue; as Tolstoy said, God is a lousy novelist.

In the end, I would need to speak with my former student. Rather than a phone conversation or e-mail exchange, Sarah suggested we meet in person. Halloween, she was scheduled to attend a special late-night screening of Lost in the Dark at the Joppenburgh Community Theater. Why didn’t we get together before that? She’d bring her laptop; there were clips she could show me that would prove interesting. I agreed, which has brought me here, seated at the back of Pete’s Corner Pub, while trick-or-treaters make their annual pilgrimage.

Sarah Fiore enters the bar as she used to enter my classroom—walking briskly, head down, oversized bag clutched to her side. The heels of her boots knock on the wood floor. She’s wearing a hip-length black leather coat over a white blouse and black jeans. With her head tilted forward, her long black hair curtains her face. Before the hostess on duty can approach her, she’s crossed to where I’m sitting and slid into the bench across from me. Since I didn’t meet her until she was in her mid-twenties, I don’t see as dramatic a change in her as I often do with my former students. That said, time has passed, which I’ve no doubt she notices in the tide of white hairs that has swept both sides of my beard, and is washing through what brown remains on my chin. We exchange greetings, Sarah orders a martini from the waitress who’s hurried to the booth, and she slides a gray laptop from her bag. She places it on the table in front of her, unopened. Hands flat on either side of it, she asks me if I’ve talked to the other members of the original crew.

With the exception of Chad Singer, I say, I have, and relay to her abbreviated versions of our conversations. She smirks at Kristi Nightingale’s cursing, drops her head in an attempt to conceal a laugh at George Maltmore’s furious show. Larry Fessenden’s non-committal response receives a nod, as does Isabelle Router’s remark about them being lost in the dark. “She was intrigued to learn that I had been your teacher,” I add, but it draws no further response from Sarah.

The server returns with Sarah’s drink, asks me if I’d like more coffee. I decline. If you need anything, she says, and leaves.

“All right,” Sarah says after tasting her drink. “How should we do this?”

“Why don’t we start with a question: why now? Why wait ten years to reveal this new information? Wouldn’t it have been simpler to do so back when the movie was first released?”

“Possibly,” Sarah says. “I don’t know. At the time, Isabelle and I weren’t on speaking terms. We still aren’t, but then, it was new. We’d had this massive fight—things didn’t just turn ugly, they turned hideous. Everything felt pretty raw. Part of me did want to go public with the documentary stuff, but it was mostly because I thought it would hurt Isabelle. She was back at graduate school, trying to pull together a dissertation. If word got out that she’d been part of this crazy documentary project, I figured it would make her study less pleasant.

“For once in my life, though, I listened to my inner Jiminy Cricket and did the right thing. For a long time after that, I was so busy, I didn’t have time to think about the footage. Really, when I sat down for the interview with Rue Morgue , I had no intention of mentioning any of that stuff. It just… came out. I don’t see the harm in it, now. I mean, Isabelle left her doctoral program, didn’t she? Isn’t she a massage therapist or something?”

“Yoga instructor,” I say. “But you have to admit—”

“The timing is highly suspicious, yes. I can’t blame anyone who thinks that. It’s what I would say.”

“You, however, have the original documentary.”

Sarah nods. “I do.” She raises the laptop’s screen. “The problem is, we’re living in an age where it’s easy to fake stuff like this. If you have the resources, you can put together something that would fool everyone up to and maybe including the experts. Although, why would you want to?” She lifts a hand to forestall my answer. “Yeah, publicity, I know. It’s a case of diminishing returns. If all I was after was to generate interest in the movie, I would have ended my story saying that the original footage was lost, wiped when my computer crashed. It wouldn’t be worth whatever meager spike in sales you might project for me to go to the trouble of creating a new fake film.”

“Which is exactly the sort of thing I’d expect you to say, if you were trying to pass off a fake movie as authentic.”

“Yeah,” she says, sweeping her fingers over the computer’s touch pad to bring it to life. “The thing is, if you want to believe something’s a conspiracy, you will. No matter what I say, one way or the other, it’ll be evidence of what you’re looking for.”

“Fair enough.”

“Okay.” She taps keys, and turns the computer ninety degrees, allowing me a view of the screen. The window open shows a woman’s head and shoulders foreground right, the entrance to the mine background left. It’s Isabelle Router, her face burnished by the same late afternoon sunlight that paints the rock face behind her bronze. “This is how we began,” Sarah says. “Isabelle standing in front of the mine, reciting the history of the mystery woman. We could watch it, but you already know the story, right?”

“Right.”

“Let’s…” She fast forwards ten minutes. We’re inside the mine, rough rock walls and ceiling, scattered trash on the floor. To anyone who’s seen Lost in the Dark , it’s a familiar shot, although the voices are different. Somewhere off screen to the right, Chad Singer is saying, “Am I going to have to carry this for very long? Because it is heavy.” From what sounds as if it might be behind the camera, George Maltmore is muttering about the acoustics of this damn place. Much closer, Kristi Nightingale says, “Eww,” at the desiccated carcass of a small animal, likely a mouse. “We had to swap out the soundtrack for something more atmospheric,” Sarah says to me. “Plus, Chad had left, so we couldn’t use his voice.” She pauses the video. “There’s plenty more of this kind of thing I can show you, if that’s what you want.” She advances five minutes, to the crew encountering a piece of Jack-Kirby-esque machinery the approximate dimensions of a refrigerator, its yellow paint faded and flaked away in patches, the large round openings in its sides strung with cobwebs. A leap of another six minutes brings us to the comic relief of the ancient Playboy , its cover and interior pages crumpled. The crew’s jokes approximate those in the later film. Ten minutes more down the dark tunnel brings the first surprise of the interview, the portrait of a woman’s face on the rock wall. It’s exactly as it appears in Lost in the Dark . Despite myself, I flinch, say, “Jesus. This is for real?”