Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

“It’s what we found,” Sarah says.

I stare at the waves of the woman’s hair, the lines of her cheekbones and nose, the weird smearing on the right hand side of the drawing, which gives the left half of the face a roughly skeletal appearance. I fight the urge to reach my fingers to the screen. “I assumed—I mean, I know Isabelle’s uncle mentioned it in his story, but I figured he invented it.”

“Me, too,” Sarah says. “It seemed hard to believe, didn’t it? Like something out of a horror movie.”

“Who did it?” I can’t stop looking at the portrait, which is in some ways no different from what I’ve seen previously, and in other ways has been fundamentally changed. Stranger still, the portrait’s resemblance to Isabelle remains as strong as ever. “I mean, did Isabelle have any friends who were artists?”

“She swore it wasn’t her,” Sarah says. She lets the movie play. The camera pans from the tunnel wall to Isabelle, who is not pleased. “Very funny,” she says.

“What do you mean?” Kristi says.

“You think I don’t know who this is?”

“Isabelle,” Sarah says, “we didn’t do this.”

“Yeah, right,” Isabelle says.

“Seriously,” Kristi says.

“You think we had something to do with this?” Priya Subramani says.

“Obviously,” Isabelle says. “How else do you explain it?”

“Um, someone drew it,” Chad says. “Someone who isn’t one of us.”

“Are you sure?” Isabelle says.

“Yeah,” Chad says. “When my friends say they didn’t do something, I believe them.”

“What would be the point?” Sarah says. “Why would we do this, and then lie to you about it?”

Doubt softens Isabelle’s features, but already, she’s invested too much in the argument to yield the point. Plus, she doesn’t want to contemplate the implications of the crew telling the truth. She says, “Whatever,” and turns away.

The camera swings to Sarah, who blows out through pursed lips while rolling her eyes.

“Probably should have omitted that last bit,” she says, tapping the touch pad and freezing the screen. “After we returned from the mine and were going through the footage, Kristi suggested that maybe Isabelle was responsible for the drawing. I told her there was no way, she was being ridiculous. Had she not seen Isabelle’s reaction to the thing? When the group of us met to screen what Kristi and I had put together, she asked Isabelle about the portrait point blank. I didn’t stop her. I’ll admit: I was curious. Isabelle acted genuinely surprised at the accusation, enough for me to believe her. Although, when I think about her performance in Lost in the Dark , how well she acted, I wonder.”

“Why would she have done that?”

“To back up the story that had brought us there in the first place,” Sarah says.

“I don’t know,” I say. “That seems like a little far to go.”

“Well.” Sarah brings the movie ahead another ten minutes, hurrying the crew through a pair of large spaces whose flat ceilings rest on rock columns the girth of large trees. In the second chamber, their flashlights pick out a shape to the right, a dark mound like a heap of rugs. Flashlights trained on the thing, they cross the space towards it. As they approach, the mound gains definition, resolving into the carcass of a large animal. When they reach it, Sarah returns the film to normal speed.

“—is it?” Chad is saying.

“I think it’s a bear,” Sarah says.

“No way,” Kristi says.

“There are bears here?” Priya says.

“Yes,” George says, “black bears.” He steps away from the group to circle the remains.

“Be careful,” Priya says.

“Yeah, George,” Chad says, “watch yourself.”

“Relax,” George says, “this fellow’s been dead a long time.” He crouches next to the bear’s blunt head, playing his light back and forth over it. His eyes narrow. “What the hell?”

“What?” Sarah says.

“What is it?” Priya says.

“From the looks of things,” George says, “something tore out Gentle Ben here’s throat.”

“Is that strange?” Chad says.

“What could do that?” Kristi says.

“I have no idea,” George says. “Another bear, maybe. A mountain lion, I guess.”

“Hang on—I want to see this,” Kristi says. The camera moves around the animal’s prostrate form to where George sits on his heels, his flashlight directed at the bear’s head. Its eyes are sunken, shriveled, its teeth bared in a final snarl. The right canine is missing, the socket ragged, black with blood long-crusted. What should be the animal’s thick neck is a mess of skin torn into leathery ribbon and flaps, laying bare dried muscle and dull bone. “Jesus,” Kristi says.

“Should be more blood,” George says. He sweeps his flashlight over the floor around them, whose dust and rock are unstained. “Huh.”

“What does that mean?” Priya says.

“Could it be, I don’t know, poachers?” Chad says.

“Black bear isn’t protected like that,” George says. “You’re supposed to have a license, but if you shot one by mistake, you wouldn’t need to go to this amount of trouble to hide it. Not to mention, I don’t know what gun would inflict this type of wound.”

“Maybe it was shot,” Chad says, “came in here to escape, and another bear got it.”

George shrugs. “Anything’s possible. Doesn’t explain the lack of blood, though.”

“I do not like this,” Kristi says.

“Hey,” Priya says, “where’s Isabelle?”

Sarah pauses the movie.

“What happened to Isabelle?” I say.

“She… wandered off,” Sarah says.

“In a mine?”

“Yeah,” Sarah says, “that was what the rest of us thought.”

“Where did she go?”

“All the way to the end of the mine, and then further. There’s a network of caves the mine connects to. We spent most of the shoot searching for her—about fifteen hours.” The next twenty minutes of the film advance in a succession of scenes, each of which leaps ahead another half hour to hour and a half. The expression on the crew’s faces oscillate between irritation and worry, with intermittent stops at fatigue and unease. Sarah says, “We hadn’t brought much in the way of food or drink; we hadn’t expected to be down there for more than a couple of hours. We ran out of both pretty quickly. Not long after, Chad floated the idea of turning around, heading for the surface, where we could call for help, bring in some professionals to find Isabelle. Kristi was aghast at the thought of abandoning her here. The others agreed. We kept on moving further underground. Isabelle had left enough of a trail for us to follow; although there were a couple of times we really had to search for it. Finally, we arrived at this spot.”

She taps the touchpad. The screen shows the tunnel dead-ending in a shallow chamber filled with junk: rows of rusted barrels, any identifying marks long flaked off; cardboard boxes in various stages of mildewed collapse; shovels and pickaxes, mummified in dusty cobwebs; a stack of eight or nine safety helmets leaning to one side.

“Shit,” Sarah says.

“What do we do now?” Chad says.

“Go back,” George says, “see if we can pick up the trail again at that last fork.”

“Hang on,” Kristi says. The view moves behind the row of barrels closest to the wall. As the camera’s light shifts, so do the barrels’ shadows, swinging away from the rock to reveal a short opening in it. “Guys,” Kristi says, bringing the camera level with her discovery. Manhole-sized and-shaped, the aperture admits to a brief passage, which ends in darkness.

“What is it?” Sarah says.

“Some kind of tunnel,” Kristi says. The opening swims closer.