Каарон Уоррен - The Best Horror of the Year Volume Ten

It shouldn’t have opened, but it did. I can’t remember whether he looked back before he stepped over the threshold, daring me to follow, giving me one last chance to keep my promise.

From where I stood, it looked like he fell into a solid wall of darkness, visible one moment, then gone. I hesitated; it was only a split second, I’m sure. My chest tightened; my heart kicked against my ribs. I hated Gen for everything he had and hadn’t done, then I loved him again, and I sprinted up the porch steps.

I caught myself on the doorframe. Must and still air greeted me. My upper body leaned inside, while my feet stayed planted outside the door.

A staircase stretched up to my left; a hallway receded to the right. Doorways opened in either direction, revealing furniture-less rooms. Blank walls, nowhere for Gen to hide.

I must have shouted his name, because it echoed back to me. I caught a flash of movement, a small face peering over the railing at the top of the stairs, but it wasn’t Gen.

I took the stairs two at a time, wheezing the way Gen did in the middle of an asthma attack. In room after room, my feet kicked up dust. My footsteps overlapped until it seemed like a whole herd of ghosts running with me. I searched, going through more rooms than the house should have, but Gen wasn’t in any of them.

Finally, I pulled out my phone. Fumbling, I got Ghost Hunt! open. Nothing. Nothing except green lines briefly skittering across my screen, accompanied by a sound like snow ticking against windows, building up and sealing away the inside like a tomb.

I shouted Gen’s name over and over, but no one answered me. In the end, I folded myself onto the top step. I wrapped my arms around my legs, my knees pressed against my chest, and struggled to breathe.

Before we moved away from Dieu-le-Sauveur, before my parents got divorced, one more thing happened. On a rainy day, I crossed through the hedge and knocked on the clubhouse door. Moisture spotted my shirt and dampened my hair. I heard shuffling inside, hesitation, then Luke opened the door. An uncomfortable glance passed around the room like they’d just been talking about me. I didn’t blame them.

Luke sat back down, and I sat beside him. Holly put away her phone, her expression guilty. I suspected they’d been comparing ghosts like nothing happened.

No one said anything. It was clear they wished I hadn’t come; everything would be so much easier if I’d just disappeared along with Gen. I didn’t disagree. The truth was, I didn’t know why I was there either. Except it was better than listening to my parents shout or staring at the walls while my eyes stung.

In that awkward silence, while everyone searched for something to say, my phone pinged.

I hadn’t opened Ghost Hunt! since Gen disappeared, but the sound was unmistakable—Auto Detect kicking in. It was so quiet I could hear everyone breathing. Then Holly spoke, her voice barely more than a whisper and rough around the edges.

“Aren’t you going to look?”

Her eyes were bright, but for once it wasn’t with eagerness. She looked like she regretted her words, but couldn’t stop herself.

I picked up my phone. Green wavy lines scrolled across the screen. At first, all we could hear was wind blowing and an old house creaking. Then the sound of breathing. Louder than any of us, and getting more strained. Someone struggling, someone running out of air. I thought of Gen touching his throat. I wanted to scramble in his pack for an inhaler that wasn’t there.

Before I threw my phone against the clubhouse wall. Before it shattered and tears gathered in my eyes and my own breath hitched in response to the terrible noises coming out of my phone, one more thing happened. We heard a voice.

It was a bare whisper, but I would recognize it anywhere—Gen saying my name.

The figures are drawn in yellow ochre, their limbs overlong, their faces drawn as skulls—white with crushed calcite, eyes carbon black with a spark of red ochre inside. Each figure holds an orb-like jar beneath its chin. Umber shadows trail behind them as they march the length of the chamber, deep into the small spaces at the back of the cave, where there is the monster. A mass all in soot bone black, large as the cave wall, covered in a hundred lidless eyes. The eyes are not drawn, but etched into the stone itself.

Ashley looked from the cave wall back to her sketch and smoothed her thumb over a figure’s shadow, blending her pencil lines. Henri’s camera flashed, blinding her. When her eyes adjusted, pupils wavering into equilibrium, her LED lantern seemed dimmer than before, the figures drawn on the cave walls harder to make out.

“Can you wait a minute, please?” She didn’t temper the edge in her voice. She’d asked him this a hundred times already—at the office as she checked her daypack, along the Alpine trail as he led the way at a pace she could not possibly match. You must get used to the altitude if you want to study here , he’d said as she caught up, panting, the thin air heavy in her lungs. You’re not ready to study here , is what she heard. What he probably wanted her to hear.

“I am studying here,” she’d puffed between shallow gasps. “And you can’t outrun altitude sickness. Don’t they teach that to guides here?” She’d planted herself on a rock and made him wait.

His camera flashed again. “We don’t have time.” Another photo. “We’ve waited half the day away. Your drawings are too slow. We don’t do it that way anymore.”

Ashley shifted; the cold of the cave floor had crept through the sweater she’d folded into a cushion. She counted to ten, her eyes squeezed shut against the flashes. “I’m not just sketching to record them, Henri. I’m learning them—studying them.”

“You can do that in the lab, unless you want to hike back in the dark. You’re wasting time. We don’t even know if you’ll be allowed to study these.”

She stood then, clutching her pencils in her fist. “What do you mean?”

“You came to study bears? These aren’t bears. There are bears in the other chamber you can study—we have enough of those to share. But this is special. This is weird. They will want a Swiss archaeologist for this.”

Ashley hadn’t considered that. When she’d proposed the expedition to explore the new chambers exposed by the receding glacier, she’d counted on finding either cave bears or nothing. Instead she’d found a national treasure. The specters from the camera flash danced in her eyes as she added notes to her handwritten report. He hadn’t convinced her to hurry. Now her notebook was more important than ever—it might be the only proof she’d have of the discovery, if the site was seized.

The cave painting showed at least twenty figures confronting the shadow covered with eyes. The skull-faced figures threw bones at the shadow, though it wasn’t clear if they were fighting it or feeding it. Ashley paced the length of the chamber, back toward where she had to bow her six-foot-seven frame to fit beneath the mineral-slick stone. The eyes of the monster seemed to follow her, their charcoal-darkened shadows shifting in the weak light. It made the hair on her arms rise, made it difficult to look away from the creature—as if it would move closer when her back turned.

A dozen skeletal remains filled shallow alcoves that lined the walls beneath the drawings. Beyond the alcoves, two narrow openings split the back of the cave. One led to nothing but a cavernous sinkhole. The other led to the much-trafficked cave chamber containing the remains of several cave bears. No one had known that the loose rubble wall of the cave bear room had concealed the entrance to another chamber. No one had wanted to disturb the stones and risk a cave-in. But with temperatures rising, the ice on the opposite slope had melted away, and the true entrance to the cave had opened its dark eye over the valley below.