Haunted Nights

by Ellen Datlow

  “But then what? How had she turned the tables on her captors and killed them? Not to mention, in such an…extravagantly violent manner. You could imagine adrenaline allowing her to overpower one of the men, seize his gun, and shoot him and his partner before they had the chance to react. Crushing a man’s skull against a rock wall, cracking his friend’s chest open was harder to believe. Plus, neither one showed evidence of having been armed.

  “Maybe the woman hadn’t been there to be murdered; maybe she was there to be traded. She’d been kidnapped, and the mine was the place her abductors had selected to return her to whoever was going to pay her ransom. Or she was a high-class prostitute, being transferred from one brothel to another. Either way, the scheduled meeting went pear-shaped and the men died. It didn’t explain why they had done so in such a fashion, but the cops liked it better, it felt more probable to them.

  “There were other, wilder explanations offered, too. The dead guys were Polish. This was the end of the sixties, the Cold War was in full swing, and Poland was slotted into the Eastern Bloc. Were the brothers foreign agents? Was the woman a fellow spy who had failed in her duties? Had she been sent here to be liquidated? Then rescued by other spies? Or were the brothers working for the U.S. government, and the woman a captured spy who had to vanish? These weren’t the craziest scenarios, either. Rosemary’s Baby was pretty big at this time, which may explain why some people picked up on the detail of the nun who stepped off the train. Could it be that the woman had been carrying the spawn of Satan, or otherwise involved in diabolical activities? It would account for the savagery of the brothers’ deaths—the devil and his followers are pretty ferocious—if not for what the men had been doing at the mine in the first place. It’s been a while since the Catholic Church sanctioned anyone’s murder.

  “In the end, the investigation dead-ended. Officially, it was left open, but in the absence of any credible leads, the cops turned their attention elsewhere.”

  Sarah drinks more water. “Within a year or two, the local kids were telling stories about the woman in the mine. Some of them portrayed her as criminally insane, delivered to the place to be kept in a secret cell constructed for the sole purpose of confining her. Other accounts made her a witch, dropped at the mine for essentially the same purpose, imprisonment. Whether she was natural or supernatural, the woman escaped her bonds, slaughtered her jailors, and was now on the loose, ready to abduct any child careless enough to allow her too close. A few years later, when The Exorcist was released, the narrative adapted itself to the film, and the woman became demonically possessed, transported upstate for an exorcism, which obviously had failed. It was one of the peculiarities of the story, the way it shaped itself to the current cultural landscape. The woman morphed into a teen with dangerous psychic abilities, an alien masquerading as a human, even a vampire. For older kids, venturing into the mine, especially at night, and especially at Halloween, became a rite of passage. After the railroad stopped running in the seventies, high school and college kids would drive to the access road and hike to the entrance to build bonfires and drink.

  “A similar process happens all over the country—all over the world. Something bad happens, and it hardens into the seed for stories about a monstrous character. This was what Isabelle’s dissertation director said. There was nothing unusual about the woman in the mine, as the local kids called her. Isabelle disagreed, said she had additional information that distinguished this narrative from the rest. Once again, it involved her uncle, Rich, the cop.

  “Ten years to the date after he answered his first call about the mine, he received a second. A group of high school seniors had been partying outside the entrance, and one of them had gone into it on a dare. That was three hours ago, and there had been no sign of him since. A couple of the other kids started in after their missing friend but could find no trace of him as far as they dared to go. Everybody panicked, and eventually someone who was sober enough drove home and phoned the police. The Huguenot cops were busy with a costume party at one of the university’s dorms that had gotten out of hand when someone spiked the punch with acid, so the call was booted to the state troopers. Rich suspected a Halloween prank, probably by the missing kid on his friends, possibly by all the kids on the cops. Despite that, he drove to the access road and made his way on foot to the spot.

  “There, he encountered a dozen teenagers, all of them more or less sober, so sick with worry, he decided they must be telling the truth. Flashlight in hand, he set off into the mine to search for their friend. He wasn’t nervous, he told Isabelle. Sure, he remembered the bodies of the men he’d discovered a decade before, but he’d seen a lot of dead bodies in the meantime, and if none was quite as bad as those two, a few had come close. The dark had never bothered him, nor did the thought of being underground. He was more concerned about the debris littering the floor: rocks of varying sizes, dusty boxes, rusted bits of old machines, the occasional tool. His feet crushed fast-food containers, kicked the bones of small animals, clanged on an empty metal lunch box. There was one good thing about the clutter—it allowed him to track the missing student without much difficulty.

  “He came across graffiti farther inside the mine than he would have expected. He read names of people, sports teams, bands. He saw hearts encasing the names of lovers, peace symbols, even the anarchist A. He stumbled through a heap of beer cans, whose musical clatter wasn’t as comforting as he would have liked. Finally, he came upon the portrait.”

  “Portrait?” Edie says.

  “A woman’s face,” Sarah says, “done in charcoal on a patch of rock about head level. Whoever she was, Rich said, she was striking. Long black hair, high, strong cheekbones, full lips. Her left eye had been smeared, which made it look like a hole into her skull. The artist had given the picture a force, a vitality Rich struggled to define. He said it was as if she were two seconds away from stepping right out of the rock.

  “By this point, he was pretty far in. Any sounds of the high school students had long since ceased. He was grudgingly impressed that the kid had traveled this distance. On the right, the tunnel he’d been walking opened on a shallow chamber. He swept his light across it and stopped. There was a bed in there, its metal frame spotted orange with rust from the damp, its mattress black with mold. Lying half on the bed was a long piece of clothing—a straitjacket. He entered the room, lifted the restraint to check it. Mold blotched the material. What wasn’t mold was covered in writing, in symbols. He saw rows of crosses, Stars of David, crescent moons, other figures he didn’t recognize but assumed were religious, too. He held up the straitjacket, passed the light over it. The right front side and sleeve were stained with what he was certain was blood. He replaced the garment on the bed and heard a footstep behind him.

  “It was some kind of miracle, Rich said, he didn’t spin around gun in hand and shoot whoever was there, or at least brain them with his flashlight. Of course it was the missing student, who’d gotten himself good and lost in the mine’s recesses and had only come upon Rich through dumb luck. ‘Why didn’t you call for help?’ he asked the kid. Because there was someone else down there, the kid said. A woman. He’d seen her at the other end of one of the tunnels, right before the torch he was carrying guttered out. There was something wrong with her face, and when she saw him, her expression made him turn and run as fast as he could. The student couldn’t say how long he’d been hiding, listening. He’d thought Rich was her and had debated fleeing farther into the mine before she saw him. Now that he’d found Rich, it was imperative the two of them exit this place without delay.

  “Had he heard the kid’s story outside, Rich told Isabelle, beside the fire he and his friends had built, he would have taken the tale with a block of salt. This far into the mine, the only source of light his flashlight, facing the stone cell with the weird straitjacket, the tale sounded less incredible. The student was all for bolting for the entrance, which Rich nixed. They needed to pay attention to their surroundings, he said,
or the kid would find himself lost again, and he didn’t want that, did he? ‘No way,’ the kid said.

  “The walk back to the surface took a long time. Rich did his best to remain calm, not let the student’s hysteria affect him, but there was a stretch of tunnel, about halfway to the exit, in which he was suddenly certain he and the kid were not alone. The hair on the back of his neck lifted, and his mouth went dry. For fear of spooking the student, he didn’t want to stop, but the echo of their feet on the walls made it difficult to decide if the sound he thought he was hearing, a whispering noise, like fabric swishing over rock, was more than his imagination. He didn’t want to put his hand on his gun, either, though the spot between his shoulders itched, as if something was stalking him and the kid, just a handful of footsteps behind them in the dark. The kid picked up on it, too, and asked him if there was someone else there with them, if she had found them. Rich heard the panic rising in the student’s voice and said no, it was only the two of them. If the kid suspected him of lying, he didn’t say anything.

  “At last—at long last, Rich walked the student out of the mine and into the waiting arms of his friends, who were overjoyed at their reappearance. It was all he could do, Rich said, not to look back into the mine. He was afraid he’d see a woman standing inside it, something terribly wrong with her face.”

  There’s a moment of silence, during which both Kristi and Ben fidget. Finally, Edie says, “That’s…incredible.”

  “Isabelle thought so,” Sarah says. “A couple of years after that, the stories about the woman in the mine gained a new detail: the left side of her face was scarred. Whether the student Rich had retrieved told his story, or other kids ventured into the mine and discovered the drawing he’d seen, that became part of the description. It didn’t hurt that the first Nightmare on Elm Street was released around then, with its disfigured villain. The point is, there was something interesting going on, and Isabelle already had enough information to justify further research and analysis. She told me she was planning to make the woman in the mine the center of her dissertation, an instance of the way traditional folk story was affected by the presence and pressure of newer narrative forms. The professor overseeing the project disagreed. She more than disagreed; she told Isabelle her idea was a nonstarter. Instead, she wanted Isabelle to go south, to Kentucky, where there were reports of a lizard monster that had been spotted during a local disturbance at the end of the sixties. It wasn’t that Isabelle wasn’t interested in the lizard monster, but she had done a lot of work on the other topic, and she didn’t want to drop it. Her professor’s attitude left her unsure what to do, scrap what she had and start over, or look for another director who would be more agreeable to her plans. Either way, she was watching the completion of her dissertation recede into the future. Which happens, but is still a bummer.

  “Enter me. Through five years of busting my ass, I had convinced Larry that I could and should be trusted with a camera and a small crew. We were searching for the right project. I read a lot of scripts; nothing clicked. I tried writing a couple of screenplays, myself, but they weren’t any better. Then one night, I’m talking to Isabelle on the phone. We spoke every couple of weeks, caught up on what each of us was doing. She’d been telling me about the woman in the mine forever, since undergrad. I must have heard the story a thousand times. This particular night, the thousand and first time, things fell into place, and I realized I had my movie right in front of me. I would take Isabelle’s research project, and I would put it on-screen. I would make a documentary about the woman from the mine, about the whole weird thing. Isabelle had assembled a huge archive. There were audio interviews with twenty people. There were hundreds of photographs. There were maps. There were police reports, train schedules, articles about mining. Before I even started, I figured I had a good portion of what I needed for my movie. Production costs would be relatively low, which is never a bad thing for a beginning filmmaker. Sure, a documentary wasn’t exactly the most exciting debut, but I planned to jazz it up by filming an excursion to the mine. We’d take a look around inside, see if we couldn’t find the drawing Isabelle’s uncle had described. If we did—or better, if we located the straitjacket—it would give the film an added oomph.

  “Isabelle didn’t need much convincing. She saw the documentary as a middle finger to her professor, a way of demonstrating exactly how wrong the woman was. I doubted it would matter to her; her head sounded as if it was pretty tightly wedged up her own ass. But the idea led Isabelle to sign on with me, so I didn’t argue.”

  “Hold on,” Edie says, “hold on. Did you make this? Are you telling me Lost in the Dark is a documentary?”

  “No,” Sarah says, “no, it’s—it’s more complicated than that.” For the first time in the interview, she is flustered. Both Kristi and Ben appear to be barely containing the impulse to bolt. “We went to the mine—this was after Isabelle and I had put together a rough introduction, twenty minutes laying out the story of the mysterious woman. Her uncle Rich was retired in Tampa, but we interviewed him via phone, and he repeated everything he’d told Isabelle. I had arranged for a professor from SUNY Huguenot who specialized in folklore to sit down for a conversation with Isabelle about the woman.

  “First, though, I wanted to shoot our trip. I planned it for Halloween, because how could I not? That was when everything had started, when kids built their bonfires outside the entrance, when Rich had ventured into its tunnels. I had my crew: Kristi on camera, George Maltmore on sound, a couple of film students who’d agreed to do whatever we needed them to. The barest of bones. And Isabelle, who was our guide. I gave George and Isabelle handheld cameras, and Priya and Chad a camera to split between them. I wasn’t expecting anyone to catch anything remarkable; I liked the idea of having shots from other perspectives.

  “At dusk on Halloween, we entered the mine. I was certain we’d run into kids partying there. In fact, I was counting on it. I wanted it as an illustration of an annual event, a local ritual. But there was no one there. As far as setbacks go, it wasn’t bad. After filming the mine’s exterior, we walked into it.”

  Edie waits a beat, then says, “And…?”

  “And we came out again,” Sarah says. “Eventually.”

  II

  A SYNOPSIS OF Lost in the Dark is simple enough: An academic leads a film crew into an abandoned mine in search of a mysterious woman who disappeared there decades ago. While in the mine, the crew is plagued by strange and frightening incidents, culminating in a confrontation with the missing woman, who is revealed to be a supernatural creature. After she brutally murders most of the crew, the others flee deeper into the mine. The movie ends with the survivors proceeding into the dark, pursued by the woman.

  The devil lives in the details, though, doesn’t he? After all, you could make a terrible film from such a plot. There are three scenes, I think, on which the movie’s success depends. It seems to me a good idea to pause here a moment and consider them. The IMDb listing for Lost in the Dark features what has to be one of the most thorough descriptions of any film listed on the site. At twenty-three thousand words, it’s clearly a labor of love. In the interest of not reinventing the wheel, I’d like to quote its summaries of the scenes I’m interested in. This is how the movie begins:

  Synopsis of Lost in the Dark (2006)

  The content of this page was created directly by users and has not been screened or verified by IMDb staff.

  Warning! This synopsis may contain spoilers.

  See plot summary for non-spoiler summarized description.

  Professor Isabelle Price (Isabelle Router) is being interviewed in her office. Thirty-five years ago, she says, on Halloween night, a woman was brought by train from Hoboken, New Jersey, to a spot north of the upstate New York town of Huguenot. As she speaks, the screen cuts to a shot of a 1960s-era passenger train speeding across farmland, then back to her. The woman’s name, she says, was Agatha Merryweather. The screen shows a graduation-style portrait of a young
woman with dark eyes and long black hair. The image switches to a large blue-and-white two-story house. In a voice-over, the professor says that for the previous four years, Agatha Merryweather had been confined to the basement of her parents’ home in Weehawken, New Jersey. During that time, neighbors reported frequent shouts, screams, and crashes coming from the house. The photograph of the house is replaced by one of police reports fanned out over a desktop. The Weehawken police, the voice-over continues, responded to 108 separate noise complaints; although only at the very end did they actually enter the house. The camera zeroes in on the report on top of the pile. When the Merryweathers opened the front door to their house, Professor Price says, the police saw the living room in shambles, furniture upended, lamps smashed, a bookcase tipped over. They also saw Agatha Merryweather, age twenty-one, crouched in one corner of the living room, wearing a filthy nightdress. The screen shows a photograph of a middle-aged man and woman, him in a brown suit, her in a green dress. Agatha’s parents, the voice-over says, assured the officers that things were not as they appeared. Their daughter was not well, and every now and again, she had fits. The police thought the couple was acting strangely, so they entered the house. One of them approached the girl. The screen shows an open door, its interior dark. The other officer, Professor Price says, was drawn to the door to the basement. As the camera focuses on the darkness within the doorway, she says, he noticed that the door had been bolted and padlocked, but that the bolt and the lock had been torn loose when the door was thrown open, apparently with great force. There were no working lights in the basement, but the officer had his flashlight. He went downstairs and discovered a bare, empty space, with a pile of blankets for a bed and a pair of buckets for a toilet. The walls were covered in writing, row after row of crosses, six-pointed stars, crescent moons, other symbols the cop didn’t recognize. The smell was terrible.