They headed in.
It was dim, and, compared to outside, almost cool in the cave. But as they moved farther in it got even dimmer and hot and stuffy. Their bodies were covered with sweat, but they didn’t notice. There was a twist to the left, and then a climb that disappointed them, and then a suddenly drop which brought them real darkness and a halt.
Lem, who was pulling the wagon, rummaged through the pile and pulled out the bad flashlight, and then the good one, which he handed to Shep.
Shep switched it on and played the light over their faces.
“You look scared,” he said.
“Can we stop here for the night?” Lem asked.
Shep consulted his watch with the light beam. “It’s two in the afternoon!”
Behind them, they saw how steeply the floor had dropped; there was a circle of light leading out that looked hot and far away.
“I’m hungry,” Monk said.
“Later,” Shep answered, and turned the flashlight beam ahead of them.
There was darkness, and a steep descent, and Monk and Lem followed as the beam pointed down into it.
After twenty minutes that seemed like a day, the black wagon handle slipped out of Lem’s sweaty hand and the wagon clattered past him.
“Look out!” he called, and Monk and Shep jumped aside as the wagon roared down the steep incline ahead of them.
They heard it rattle off into the bowels of the earth, then they heard nothing.
“Why did you tell us to get out of the way?” Shep asked angrily. “We could have stopped it!”
“We’ll catch up to it,” Monk shot back.
“Sorry . . .” Lem said.
“No matter. Monk’s right.” The flashlight beam pointed ahead, and down they went.
Two real hours went by. Lem was thirsty, and Monk wanted to stop, but Shep kept going. If anything it was hotter than above now, and Lem finally panted timidly, “You think we’re almost . . . there?”
“You mean Hell?” Shep replied, and then added, “If we are, we don’t have the crucifix anymore to protect us. It’s in the wagon.”
Monk snorted, and Shep spun angrily toward him with the flashlight, which at that exact moment went out.
“Ohhh,” Lem mewled.
“Be quiet,” Shep ordered, “it’s just stuck.” They heard him shaking the flashlight in the dark, but the beam didn’t come on.
“Maybe the cover’s loose—”
There was the rattle of loosened metal, a twang, and they heard flashlight parts hitting the floor of the cave.
“Uh oh,” Monk said.
“Help me find them—” Shep ordered, but now there was a note of desperation in his voice.
“I hear rats!” Lem cried, and they all went silent.
Something was skittering in the dark ahead of them.
“Get down and help me find the parts!” Shep said, and for a few minutes there was only the sound of frightened breathing and the pat and slide of hands on the floor of the cave.
“I’ve got the lens!” Shep cried suddenly.
“And here’s the reflector!” Monk added.
“What if there are rats on the floor!” Lem said, but Shep ignored him.
“All we need is the cover, and one of the batteries. The other one is still in the body.”
“I’ve got the battery!” Monk exulted a moment later.
“I can’t find the cover!” Shep said desperately.
“I’m telling you there are rats!” Lem whimpered.
“I can’t find the cover either!” Monk.
There was fumbling in the dark, heavy breathing.
A bolt of light blinded them, went out, blinded them.
“I don’t need the cover – I’ll hold it on,” Shep said.
He pointed the flashlight, clutched together by the pressure of his hand, at his friends, Monk on the cave floor, still probing, Lem with his back against the wall, eyes closed.
The beam shot to the floor, moved crazily this way and that, then froze on a round red piece of plastic.
“The cover!” Monk yelled, and pounced on it.
“Give it to me!” Shep said.
There was more fumbling, darkness, then bright light again.
They stood huffing and puffing at their exertion.
Their breaths quieted.
The scrabbling sound was still ahead of them.
“Rats!” Lem cried, and then let out a wail.
The flashlight beam swung down and ahead of them, and caught the crashed remains of the red wagon on its side, a chewed-open box of cereal, and the long fat grey-brown length of a rat as it put its whiskered, sniffing nose into the mouse trap.
There was a loud snap! which made the light beam shiver, and then, in the darkness behind Shep, he heard Lem laugh nervously and say, “See?”
They stopped two hours later for the night. By Shep’s watch it was ten o’clock. The flashlight had gone out again, and this time it was the batteries but Shep took the batteries from the other unworking one. They were tired and hungry, thirsty and hot. The wagon was serviceable but now made a loud squeak with each turn of the front wheels. The handle had been bent, but Lem forced it back into shape. They’d found everything but one can of pop, which Monk promptly stepped on when they set out. He smelled like cream soda, and his friends didn’t let him forget it.
“We’ll need the batteries for tomorrow,” Shep said solemnly. He had found a flat wide place to stop, a kind of hitch in the slope. Ahead of them was only darkness.
It was hot and close and sticky, and they felt a vague heat drifting up at them from below.
“What happens when the batteries run out?” Lem asked.
“We’ll have to conserve them,” Shep said.
“But what happens—?”
“Be quiet,” Shep said, at the same moment Monk snapped, “Shut up, Lem.”
They ate in darkness, and drank warm soda and un-iced tea, and listened, but there was nothing to hear. No rats, no nearby roasting fires, no dripping water, no sound of any kind. Just the silent sound of heat getting hotter.
“I hope we’re close,” Lem said. “I want to go home.”
“Home to what?” Shep answered. “If we don’t find something down here . . .”
The rest went unsaid.
They sat in a circle, and moved closer, the flashlight in the midst of them like a doused campfire.
Shep laughed and said, “We never finished talking about Angle Bernstein, did we?”
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.
“It seems to prove that one of the seminal images of horror fiction has yet to be driven underground by technology. Sometimes the old ideas are best, eh? But I hope I’ve brought it up to date.”
IT MUST HAVE BEEN QUITE a nightmare. It was apparently enough to make Coe drag the quilt around him, since he feels more than a sheeted mattress beneath him, and to leave a sense of suffocating helplessness, of being worse than alone in the dark. He isn’t helpless. Even if his fit of rage blotted out his senses, it must have persuaded the family. They’ve brought him home. There wasn’t a quilt on his hospital bed.
Who’s in the house with him? Perhaps they all are, to impress on him how much they care about him, but he knows how recently they started. There was barely space for all of them around his bed in the private room. Whenever they thought he was asleep some of them would begin whispering. He’s sure he overheard plans for his funeral. Now they appear to have left him by himself, and yet he feels hemmed in. Is the dark oppressing him? He has never seen it so dark.
It doesn’t feel like his bedroom. He has always been able to distinguish the familiar surroundings when any of his fears jerked him awake. He could think that someone – his daughter Simone or son Daniel, most likely – has denied him light to pay him back for having spent too much of their legacy on the private room. However much he widens his eyes, they remain coated with blackness. He parts his dry lips to call someone to open the curtains, and then his tongue retreats behind his teeth. He should deal with the bedclothes first. Nobody ought to see him laid out as if he’s awaiting examination. In the throes of the nightmare he has pulled the entire quilt under him.
He grasps a handful and plants his other hand against the padded headboard to lift his body while he snatches the quilt from beneath him. Th
at’s the plan, but he’s unable to take hold of the material. It’s more slippery than it ought to be, and doesn’t budge. Did his last bout of rage leave him so enfeebled, or is his weight pinning down the quilt? He stretches out his arms to find the edges, and his knuckles bump into cushions on both sides of him. But they aren’t cushions, they’re walls.
He’s in some kind of outsize cot. The walls must be cutting off the light. Presumably the idea is to prevent him from rolling out of bed. He’s furious at being treated like this, especially when he wasn’t consulted. He flings up his hands to grab the tops of the walls and heave himself up to shout for whoever’s in the house, and his fingertips collide with a padded surface.
The sides of the cot must bend inwards at the top, that’s all. His trembling hands have flinched and bruised his sunken cheeks, but he lifts them. His elbows are still pressed against the bottom of the container when his hands blunder against an obstruction above his face. It’s plump and slippery, and scrabbling at it only loosens his nails from the quick. His knees rear up, knocking together before they bump into the obstacle, and then his feet deal it a few shaky kicks. Far too soon his fury is exhausted, and he lies inert as though the blackness is earth that’s weighing on him. It isn’t far removed. His family cared about him even less than he suspected. They’ve consigned him to his last and worst fear.
Can’t this be another nightmare? How can it make sense? However prematurely eager Simone’s husband may have been to sign the death certificate, Daniel would have had to be less than professional too. Could he have saved on the embalming and had the funeral at once? At least he has dressed his father in a suit, but the pockets feel empty as death.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18 Page 12
