Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

Lem laughed too. “Or how your pits smell!”

“Or your mustache!” Shep shot back.

Monk was silent.

“Hey, Monk,” Shep said, “you shaving your lip yet?”

“And using ‘B-Oderant’? You smell like cream soda, but do you also smell like a horse ?”

Monk feigned snoring.

“Hey Monk—”

The snoring ceased. “Leave me alone.”

Lem hooted: “Cream soda boy!”

“Horse pit boy!” Shep laughed.

Monk said nothing, and soon he was snoring for real.

Shep woke them up at seven o’clock by his watch.

At first he couldn’t move; it was hard to breathe and so hot he felt as if he was under a steam iron. He knew it was growing impossibly warmer. He could feel and smell and taste it, just like he had in the tree house.

“We have to find the end today,” he said, grimly.

They ate and drank in the dark, just like the night before. Now there was no talking. Lem was having trouble breathing, taking shallow ragged huffs at the air.

“Feels . . . like . . . we’re . . . in a . . . barbecue . . .” he rasped. “Hard . . . to . . . breathe . . .”

They turned on the battery radio and there was hiss up and down the dial until the one strong local channel came on. It was the same announcer, only now all of the chirp had gone out of his voice.

“. . . hundred and ten here this morning, folks,” he said. “And it’s September first! Local ponds are steamed dry, and the electricity was out for three hours yesterday. Same all over, now. Ice caps are melting, and in Australia, where it’s the end of wintertime, the temperature hit ninety-nine yesterday . . .”

They snapped off the radio.

“Let’s go,” Shep said.

Lem began to cry after a half-hour.

“I can’t do this!” he said. “Let’s go home! I want to swim in the pond, and get ready for school, and look at the fall catalogs and feel it get chilly at night!”

“It’s not much farther,” Shep said evenly. He was having trouble breathing himself. “This is something we’ve got to do, Lem. If we do it maybe we can have all that again.”

Shep pointed the flashlight at Monk, who was trudging silently, straight ahead.

The flashlight began to fail as they reached a wall of fallen rocks. Ignoring the impediment for the moment, Shep used the remaining light to rip the battery cover off the back of the radio and pull the batteries out.

They were a different size, so he put the radio on and let it stay on, a droning buzz in the background.

The flashlight went out, then flickered on again.

“Quick!” Shep shouted. “Check to either side and see if there’s a way around!”

Lem shuffled off to the left, and Monk stood unmoving where he was.

Shep pushed impatiently past him, flicking the flash on and off to pull precious weak yellow beams out of it.

“There’s no way around here,” Lem called out laconically from the left.

Shep blinked the light on, off, punched desperately around the edge of the barrier, looking for a hole, a rift, a way through.

“Nothing . . .” he huffed weakly.

He turned with a last thought, flaring the flash into life so that the beam played across Monk.

“Maybe there’s a crack! Maybe we can pull the wall down!”

“There is no crack,” Monk said dully, “and we can’t pull it down.” His legs abruptly folded underneath him and he sat on the cave floor.

Shep turned the light off, on again; the beam was dull, pumpkin colored but he played it all over the rock barrier.

“Got to be—”

“There is no ‘Hell’s Cave’,” Monk said dully. “It’s just a myth. My father told me about it when I was seven. This is just an old mine that played out and then caved in.”

“But—”

“ I made it all happen,” Monk said hoarsely, without energy. “The heat, the endless summer. It was me.”

“What?” Shep said, moving closer. On the other side, Lem sank to the floor.

“It was me . . .” Monk repeated.

Lem began to cry, mewling like a hurt kitten, and the flashlight beam died again. In the dark, Shep flicked it on, off, on, off.

“ Me ,” Monk said fiercely.

Shep hit the button one more time on the flashlight, and it flared like a dying candle, haloing Monk’s haunted face, and then faded out again.

“I didn’t want it to end.” In the darkness Monk spoke in a whispered, monotone. “I didn’t want it ever to end.”

“Didn’t want what to end?” Shep asked, confused.

“This summer,” Monk answered, sighing. “The three of us. I wanted it to last forever. I didn’t want us to . . . change. Which is what we were doing. Talking about girls instead of baseball cards, hairy legs instead of monster comics, body odor instead of swimming and telescopes. We used to do everything together and now that was going to change. When we went to Junior High Lem was going to try to date Angie Bernstein and you were going out for track. Then you would go out with Margaret O’Hearn, and the baseball cards and comics would go in the back of the closet, along with the marbles and the pup tent and the canteen and butterfly net. The chemistry set would collect dust in the corner of the basement. I could see it coming. It was all changing, and I didn’t want it to.”

“But how . . . ?” Shep asked.

In the dark, he could almost hear Monk shrug and heard him hitch a sob. “I don’t know how I did it. I just wanted it, I fell asleep crying for it at night, I prayed for it every day. Every time you and Lem started talking about girls and body hair and growing up, I prayed for it louder. And then, suddenly, it happened. And then I couldn’t make it go away . . .”

Lem cried out hoarsely, then settled into low rasping sobs.

It had become even hotter, and then hotter still. The radio, still on, blurted out a stifled cry of static and then was silent.

In the sweaty, close, unbearably hot cave, the flashlight went on with one final smudge of sick light, illuminating Monk’s crying face.

“I’m so sorry . . .” he whispered.

“Mabel?” George Meadows croaked. He could barely talk, his words fighting through the heat, which had intensified. His wife lay unmoving on the sofa, her desiccated arm hanging over the side, fingers brushing her dropped magazine. Her house dress was now completely part of the couch’s pattern, melded into it like an iron transfer. The window fan had given up. The sky was very bright. Puffs of steam rose from the floor, up from the cellar, from the ground below. Somewhere in the back of his nostrils, George smelled smoke, and fire.

“Mabel?” he called again, although now he could not feel the easy chair beneath him. He felt light as a flake of ash rising from a campfire.

His eyes were so hot he could no longer see.

He took in one final, rasping, burning breath as the world turned to fire and roaring flame around him.

And, even now, he could not resist getting in the last word, letting his final breath out in a cracked whisper even though there was no one to listen: “Yep. Hottest ever.”

RAMSEY CAMPBELL

Digging Deep

RAMSEY CAMPBELL’S LATEST NOVEL is titled Thieving Fear , and that will be followed by The Creatures of the Pool .

Along with his columns in Video Watchdog and All Hallows magazines, Campbell also now writes a column for the critical magazine Dead Reckonings as well.

“The following story came out of the air or rather the airwaves,” explains the author. “BBC Radio 4 reported that a significant number of people do indeed take their mobiles with them as my protagonist does.