Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

“You’re all right,” Priya says.

Isabelle drops her eyes, mumbles something.

“What?” Priya says.

Her gait stiff-legged, Isabelle sloshes toward the shore. She does not stop once she’s on dry land; rather, she continues barefoot past the crew, the camera tracking her. “Wait a minute,” Kristi says, “where are you going?”

Without looking back, Isabelle says, “Out.”

“That’s it?” Kristi says. “We go to all this trouble and… that’s it? ‘Out?’ Really?”

“Kristi,” Sarah says.

“No, she’s right,” Chad says.

Priya steps out of the water. “She’s obviously freaked out,” she says.

“She’s obviously a pain in my ass,” Kristi says.

“Guys,” Sarah says, “could we have this discussion while we’re keeping up with Isabelle?”

“Yeah,” Chad says, “it’d suck to lose her a second time.”

“Shut up, Chad,” Kristi says.

Three quick scenes show the crew traversing the darkness that lies between the subterranean lake and the tunnel to the mine. Even after she cuts her right foot on a rock, leaving a bloody footprint until the others catch up to her and insist on bandaging it, which George does, Isabelle maintains a brisk pace. She does not let up after they have reentered the mine; though the comments from the others shift from complaint to relief. Throughout, Kristi continues to return to the question of what happened to Isabelle, asking it at sufficient volume for her to hear; Isabelle, however, does not answer.

Not until they have reached the portrait of the woman nearer the mine’s entrance does Isabelle stop. Immobile, she stares at the artwork as the rest of the crew gathers around her.

“What now?” Kristi says.

In reply, Isabelle screams, a loud, high-pitched shriek that startles everyone into stepping back. The scream goes on, and on, and on, doubling Isabelle over, breaking into static as it exceeds the limits of the recording equipment. While Isabelle staggers from foot to foot, bent in half, her mouth stretched too wide, the soundtrack cuts in and out, alternating her screaming with an electronic hum. The members of the crew stand stunned, their expressions shocked. Tears stream from Isabelle’s eyes, snot pours from her nostrils, flakes of blood spray onto her lips and chin. The audio gives up the fight, yielding to the empty hum. Finally, Priya runs to Isabelle, puts her arms around her, and steers her away from the drawing, toward the exit. While she remains doubled over, Isabelle goes with her. Chad and George follow. For a moment, Sarah studies the portrait, then she, too, turns to leave.

The camera remains focused on the wall, at the weird image that so strikingly resembles Isabelle Router. It zooms in, until the half-skeletal portion of the face fills the screen. As it does, the soundtrack recovers. Isabelle is still screaming, the sound echoing down the mine’s tunnels. The picture goes black. “Directed by Sarah Fiore” flashes onto the screen in white letters.

“And that’s it,” Sarah says, freezing the film.

“Huh,” I say. I’m suddenly aware that in the time I’ve spent viewing Sarah’s video, the sun has dropped behind Frenchman’s Mountain, hauling night down after it. The autumn light has slid from the windows at the back of the bar, leaving a tide of blackness pressed against them. I can hear the shouts and shrieks of the trick-or-treaters, somewhere in that darkness. It’s absurd, but after spending the last hour immersed in the film’s subterranean setting, I have the impression that the blackness of the mine has escaped into the night. I swallow, say, “That’s something.”

“Larry was worried it was too oblique,” Sarah says. “He liked it, but he thought the film needed developing. I was—it was surreal, you know? I had this documentary I’d put together that showed… I don’t know what, and here was this filmmaker I respected treating it as if it was fiction, and I realized, Yeah, you could watch it that way , and then I thought, Wait, was that what it was?” She shakes her head.

“Did you ever think of telling him the truth?”

“For about half a second, until he started throwing around budget numbers, talking about possible distributors. All of it was extremely modest, but compared to what I was used to—that, and the chance it represented for me as a director—well, it wasn’t much of a decision.

“My biggest concern was Isabelle. She was in pretty rough shape after we exited the mine. Priya drove her to the ER in Wiltwyck right away. She had stopped screaming not long after Priya took her away from the portrait, but her throat was a mess. She was exhausted, dehydrated, and there was something wrong with her blood: the white blood cell count was too high, or too low; I can’t remember. Anyway, she was in the hospital for a couple of days. I assumed she’d have no interest in a return trip to the mine, to put it mildly, but I felt I owed it to her to fill her in on the new plan.”

“And?”

“And she was completely into it, which was a surprise. She offered to help me with the screenplay, and she had some great ideas. A lot of the Bad Agatha stuff came from her.” Seeing me opening my mouth, Sarah holds up a hand to forestall the inevitable question. “Yes, I asked her what had happened while she was on her own down there. She shrugged off the question, said she’d gotten lost and freaked out. Okay, I said, but what made her leave us in the first place?

“She heard something, what sounded like someone calling her name. She already thought the rest of us were pranking her with the woman’s portrait; she assumed this was more of the same. Her intent was to find whoever was saying her name and kick them in the ass. Instead, she lost track of where she was, and then she had a little bit of a breakdown, and that was all she could remember clearly until she was in the hospital.”

“Did you believe her?”

“Yes,” Sarah says, drawing out the word, “but I was pretty sure there was more she wasn’t telling me. I couldn’t figure out how to persuade her to let me in on it. She told me she was fine with returning to the mine, but I was pretty nervous about it. Honestly, I would have been happier if she’d refused. The problem was, Priya and Chad had already bowed out, which meant we couldn’t use as much of the documentary footage as I wanted. If Isabelle hadn’t agreed, then we would have had to shoot an entirely new film, which might have exceeded our meager budget. So I went with her, and I have to admit, she did a terrific job. For all the years I’d known her, I had no idea she was such a convincing actress.”

“What caused the two of you to fall out?”

Sarah frowns. “Creative differences.”

“Over?”

“A lot of things.” As if she’s just noticed the night outside, Sarah says, “Holy shit. What time is it?” She closes the window on the laptop and squints at the corner clock. “I better go,” she says, folding the computer shut. While she slides it off the table into her bag, I say, “Anything else you’d like to add?”

“It’s funny,” she says, easing out of the booth, “there have been moments when I’ve thought about posting the video online, putting it up on YouTube with no fanfare, letting whoever discovers it make of it what they will. Except, I knew people would view it as a publicity stunt, some old footage I’d stitched together to generate new interest in my movie. I had no plans to mention it on during the interview for the anniversary edition, until there I was, talking about it. Once I started, I figured, why not?”

“And people still thought it was a hoax.”

“Yeah. What are you gonna do?”

The walk from the booth to the bar to pay the bill is no more than twelve or fifteen feet, yet it seems to take us an hour to make it. My thoughts are racing, trying to fit what I’ve heard and seen this afternoon with everything else I know about Sarah and the film. After all, I’m the horror writer; it’s why the editors of this publication have asked me to conduct this interview. I’m supposed to judge the veracity of Sarah’s footage and, assuming I accept it as true, trace its connections to Lost in the Dark , explain the ways in which the fiction refracts the facts. It’s a favorite critical activity, isn’t it? Especially when it comes to the fantastic, demonstrating how it’s only the stuff of daily life, after all. The vampire is our repressed eroticism, the werewolf our unreasoning rage. The film Sarah has shown me, though, isn’t the material of daily life. I don’t know what it is, because to tell you the truth, I’m more of a skeptic than a believer these days. Strange as it sounds, it’s one of the reasons I love to write about the supernatural. The stories I tell offer me the opportunity to indulge a sense of the numinous I find all too lacking in the world around me. But this movie… I can’t help inventing a story to explain it, something to do with an ancient power captured, brought to a remote location, and imprisoned there. Those dead men at the entrance, maybe they were there as a sacrifice, a way to bind whatever was in that nameless woman to the mine. The stuff inside the tunnels, the caves beyond, was that evidence of someone or someones tending to the woman, worshipping her? And Isabelle Router, her experience underground—was the movie she co-wrote an act of devotion to something that found her in the dark? I half-remember the line from Yeats about entertaining a drowsy emperor.