The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

by Stephen Jones (ed. )

  Claustrophobia mounted quickly, fired by the knowledge that some booby trap could bring the whole thing down upon me. The tunnel roof pressed down against my back. My elbows were constricted against the walls on either side so that I had to drag myself along like an animal. With each foot I crawled, it felt like my throat constricted another half inch.

  And then Van Diemen was pulling himself out and up. I followed so frantically I almost knocked the old man over. We were in an underground room big enough to stand, with a makeshift table, a stubby candle, still alight, and more guns.

  “I don’t get it,” one of the Rats said uneasily. “They wouldn’t leave their weapons lying around like this.”

  “Unless the whole place is a trap,” the other Rat mused. He shrugged, did eeny-meeny between the two tunnels that ran off from the room, then ducked into the one he had selected, knife clenched between his teeth.

  “What are we looking for, Professor?” I ventured.

  He smiled, quite warmly I thought, but knew what I was attempting. “Secrets.” He waved one long, delicate finger in my face. “And mysteries.”

  The tunnel system was a maze, switching back and forth and cross-cutting, with room after room that looked exactly like the last one. We could have crawled for miles for all I knew. And the ever-present threat never lessened, so that by the end my chest burned and my muscles ached from the constant alertness. I felt queasy from the feeling that each movement could be my last. I thought about explosions in that confined area, the heat, the ripping shrapnel. I thought about the soil coming down hard, into my mouth, my throat. I thought about a gun emerging from a shadow to blast into my temple. Poison gas. Burning chemicals. I thought about everything. But I didn’t believe the Professor considered any of them. He was calm and focused on the matter at hand, as though these things held no fear for him at all.

  I don’t quite know how it happened, but at some point the Professor and I got separated from the Tunnel Rats and the other snappers. We’d been warned against this happening and I thought we’d been taking special care. Maybe not; or maybe the Professor, who was ahead of me, wanted it that way.

  We found ourselves in one of those rooms carved out of the earth. In the light of the Professor’s torch it appeared empty, but I caught a glimpse of a doorway to other rooms beyond.

  “We should wait.” The pounding of the blood in my brain made me dizzy. “Let the experts clear the place out before we go stumbling around.”

  “They will not find anything.” His voice was distracted.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “It is my job to be certain.”

  “The Government must be paying you a lot of money to take these kinds of risks.”

  “I am not here for money.”

  “Love, then.” I laughed, trying to ease my tension.

  He moved ahead, the light dancing around. I caught sight of something white in the room beyond.

  “Are you interested in politics . . . ?” He paused, waiting for me to fill in my name.

  “Will Kennet. Politics is for old guys who’ve forgotten how to have fun.”

  “There are many your age – and younger – who would disagree, Mr Kennet. Across America, in Australia, Europe, protests against this war are growing. The season is changing. Polarities are coming into opposition.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” We’d reach the doorway into the rooms beyond. There was that white shape again. And another. But he was moving the torch around too quickly for me to get a handle on it.

  “The young and the old. The West and the East. Authority and the forces of rebellion.”

  He stopped in the doorway. The light fell on the white shapes fully, and I could see it was stone: blocks that appeared to have been exposed in the digging of the tunnels, twin columns, with a doorway between them.

  “Order and chaos.” He pointed the torch into my face, blinding me. “Which side are you on, Mr Kennet?”

  I knocked his hand down, annoyed by his disrespect. “My own side. I told you, I’m not interested in any of that.” I’d half started to like him, but now I could see something I’d come across before, in the politicians, and the generals, and all the ones fighting to maintain their place in the world. Not something that was bad, particularly, but a hardness. A recognition that if you wanted to keep the world the way you felt comfortable with, you’d have to go one step further than the next guy. I’d decided it came from fear. Some people just didn’t like change.

  “There is only one side or the other.” He was moving again; the light painted a path to the door between the stone columns. “If you have not decided yet, you will be forced to do so soon. That is knowledge for you, Mr Kennet, given freely, earned by age. Take a short cut to wisdom and choose your path now.”

  I was more interested in the stone. I could see it carried on into a corridor beyond.

  “What is this place?”

  He carefully examined some carvings thrown up by the play of light and shade. They appeared to be illustrations of some kind, and writing; it didn’t look like any Vietnamese script I recognised. “Great age,” he mused to himself.

  “Is this what you were sent to find?”

  “I did not know what I was going to find. The reports were vague. But it appeared to be related to my particular sphere of expertise.”

  As we stepped into the corridor, the temperature dropped several degrees. Maybe it was the stone, but it didn’t feel right.

  “What is that?”

  “Metaphysics. The imposition of the rules of logic and reason on the illogical and irrational.”

  “You see, Professor, this is why Americans think Europeans come from a different planet. Same words, different language. I come from there and I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  He held an arm across my chest to stop me.

  “What is it?”

  He hushed me urgently. I peered into the dark ahead; for some reason he had covered the torch with his hand.

  “Did you hear something?” I hissed.

  “Go cautiously,” he said, as if I was thinking of doing anything else.

  I should have gone back. Every sense was telling me to do that; everything I knew about Vietnam warned me about venturing into the unknown. But I was in the grip of the moment and my own fabulous self-image.

  We moved ahead together. Chambers lay on either side of the corridor, bare stone boxes that I would have taken for prison cells if they had any doors. Van Diemen placed the torch on the flags to half-light the whole area before proceeding to examine one of the small rooms. I carried on along the corridor and was disappointed to find it came up against a bare stone wall. That was all it was, a corridor with a few rooms on either side. No buried city from Vietnam’s ancient past. No hidden “secrets and mysteries”. As dull as the rest of the tunnel complex. The whole expedition was turning into a damp squib.

  “There’s nothing here,” I said. “Let’s get back to the others.” Van Diemen mumbled some distracted reply from the depths of one of the chambers. And then my eyes fell on something out of the ordinary. Hanging from the lintel of the final chamber on the right was what at first looked like a wind-chime. It was a mixture of stones of varying sizes and hard wood, carved into unusual shapes, hung on pieces of wire that showed no signs of corrosion. I carefully lifted it down from its hook and carried it back to Van Diemen.

  “What do you make of this?” I was surprised that it was quite robust despite its appearance of fragility.

  Van Diemen emerged from the chamber, still distracted. But when he saw what I was holding he became animated. “For God’s sake, put it back!”

  “What’s the big deal?”

  He snatched it from me and attempted to push past, then stopped in his tracks, his face rigid.

  At first I thought it was my eyes adjusting from the torchlight to the gloom, but pin-pricks of luminescence were coalescing in the dark, like fireflies coming together. A definite shape, its outline ind
istinct.

  With surprising strength, Van Diemen grabbed my shirt and threw me behind him. I went down hard on the stone flags and as I hauled myself back to my feet he was already forcing me out of the corridor.

  “Get away from here,” he rasped. “Back to the helicopter. Tell the others.”

  The tiny, flickering lights were now moving towards us. I didn’t know what I was seeing, but the Professor’s anxiety was catching. I ran across the outer room and dived into the first tunnel.

  In the hi-tension atmosphere my panic flared easily. Barely thinking, I scrambled, the claustrophobia fuelling my rising emotions. When I finally burst out into the light, I must have looked like some wild man.

  Justin, Chet and Alain were sitting around drinking water from a canteen while a few of the grunts ensured the area remained secure. The spook, the General and the other officers stood to one side, talking conspiratorially. “Get out of here!” I yelled. “Back to the chopper!”

  The Pack knew me well enough to heed my warning. Justin grabbed me and pulled me with him as we ran towards the tree-line.

  The men surrounded the tunnel entrance, guns pointing into the dark hole. That was the last I saw of them.

  We didn’t stop until we made it back to the chopper, crashing to our knees breathless before breaking into anxious laughter.

  “You idiot!” Justin roared. “I bet there was nothing down there!”

  “There was!” I protested. “Some kind of . . . some kind . . .”

  Justin laughed some more at my disorientation; to be honest, I really didn’t know why I had run so hard. Imagination; or instinct?

  Yet Chet was growing agitated. “What is wrong, brother?” Alain asked.

  “It doesn’t make any sense.” Chet pointed a wavering finger at the chopper. “How could that get here if there weren’t any pilots?”

  As I stared into the empty chopper, I knew exactly what Chet meant, though it was only later when understanding came.

  Justin ran his hand through his long hair, puzzled. “He’s right. There were no pilots on board. Who was flying it?”

  “I can’t remember . . .” Alain tapped his temple. “How many came with us? Twenty-five?”

  “Twenty-four,” I corrected.

  “Twenty-three,” Justin said.

  Chet collapsed into a seated position, holding his head in his hands.

  “Definitely, twenty-two,” I said. My head was hurting. Had I breathed in some gas? Had we all been affected? I stumbled away from the chopper, trying to get a hold of myself. The sound of running came from the tree-line and I hurried towards it to usher the others back to the chopper.

  And that was when the blast stopped my world.

  I’ve turned Van Diemen’s room over, but there’s no sign to suggest whether he was there today or a week ago. But as I sit amid the chaos of his Saigon life, a frightened young Vietnamese man appears at the door. I jump up, grab him by the shoulders.

  “Professor Van Diemen?” I bark.

  He shakes his head, his eyes wondering if it would be better if I killed him before the Communists get here.

  “Old man, silver hair?”

  “Mr Harker?”

  “If that’s what he’s calling himself.”

  “Gone. To the airport.”

  Typical of his kind. Work their magic, stir up their brew of misery, and then get out when everything starts to fall apart rather than face the repercussions of their actions. I push my way out of the door and run into the crazed city.

  Feeble memories. The illusion we construct with our consciousness is such a fragile thing, easily disrupted, altered, warped. But the body on the other hand is a remarkably hardy piece of engineering. One of the grunts coming back to the chopper had stepped on a mine; apparently there were hundreds in that area and it was a miracle we’d all avoided them on the way to the tunnel system.

  Talking of miracles . . . Shrapnel took me apart. I was split open from groin to chest. Another piece hit me in the head and went straight out of the back, taking with it a third of my brain. Now you may think it’s impossible to survive having lost that much grey matter, but I can assure you that is not the case. I could cite cases of people who led fulfilling lives only for an autopsy to discover they had malformed brains the size of a walnut, but suffice to say that I did survive, though it was touch and go for a long time.

  Only fragments of the subsequent weeks come back to me. Lying on a bed in a field hospital with corpses stacked up all around, jazzed on pain and morphine. People saying, “He’ll never make it,” over and over in easy earshot as if I were already gone.

  I remember Justin at the bedside, crying, saying something about being forced to go back home, but he’d keep in touch, check up on me.

  And at one point I recall a wrinkled face leaning over me, a shock of silver hair. Van Diemen; I’m pretty sure I wasn’t dreaming. He said he was sorry in a way that, too, suggested I was already dead. I think he sat by my bed for a while, just talking to himself. Snippets come back. Something about fighting chaos . . . winning the war . . . Who cares?

  My recovery was a long, slow and agonising process. The drugs became a constant friend. I had to re-learn how to speak, how to hold a pen, write. The physical therapy was excruciating. My brain had to re-wire itself, shifting the functions from the part that was missing to what remained, nestled under the metal plate. Just to cap things, the nice zipper scar up my stomach itched like hell.

  They let me leave the hospital two years later and it was another year before I could rejoin the world. Things had moved on – rockets on the moon, bands I’d loved long gone – but the Vietnam War ploughed on regardless. The Americans hadn’t won. Nobody had as far as I could see. But I still had one thing to give me comfort: the photo of that happy, drugged-up night before I fell off the ride, reminding me of the best friends a man could ever have. It was time to look them up.

  England was nothing like Vietnam: wet, cold, quiet, safe. I’d only heard from Justin once in all the time of my recovery. That upset me; we’d been so close for so long and when I really needed his support he was no longer around. The one letter I did get from him didn’t sound like Justin at all. He told me he’d given up photojournalism and had gone back to living with his parents in their rambling old pile in Surrey, but there was an undercurrent to all the banal statements that suggested he was scared. I’m not stupid. Someone had got to him, and it had to be one of the spooks. The mission we’d muscled our way in on was top secret and those kind of people had long memories. I’d probably been written off because of my injuries – nobody expected me to be thinking never mind walking around. But Justin and the others had probably all been warned off.

  I turned up at his parents’ house late one Saturday night. It took a few seconds for his mother to recognise me – my injuries had made me haggard – but she welcomed me warmly.

  She’d heard about what happened to me in ‘Nam from my own family and I spent a few minutes making small talk about my recovery. Then I asked her if I could see Justin and she grew puzzled and then agitated.

  “Who’s Justin?” she said, kneading the palm of one hand insistently.

  I laughed. “Justin. Come on! Your son!”

  Her uneasy gaze ranged across my face. “I have no son, you know that Will. Derek and I never had children.”

  I laughed again, but it dried up when I saw she was deathly serious. You can tell when someone is pretending, especially if it’s something as big and obvious as that. My first thought was that she was covering for him. He was hiding out after the spooks’ threat, making a new life for himself.

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll go along with you. But let me show you this.” I dipped into my worn backpack that had followed me halfway round the world. The photo was crumpled after months of travelling. I handed it over. “Far right.”

  She glanced at it, shook her head, handed it back. “That’s you.”

  My stomach knotted when I looked at the picture. She was
correct – I was on the far right of the group. Of three young men. Chet, Alain and me. No Justin. My head spun; I was still shaky after the injuries and the sheer act of comprehending made me feel queasy.

  “I have no son,” she repeated in a strained voice. Another thought broke on her face. “An old man was round here a few weeks ago asking the same question. What is going on, Will?”

  I looked around the antique-stuffed study. Photos were everywhere, on the sideboard, the mantelpiece, the wall. They showed Mr and Mrs Glendenning, Justin’s aunts and uncles, family gatherings. But no Justin in any of them. There was one photo taken on our last day of school; in it, I now stood alone. It made no sense that a photo of me alone would be hanging on the Glendenning’s study wall, but when I pointed that out to Mrs Glendenning she became even more agitated.

  I went out into the rain with a shattering sense of dread and the desperate feeling that my mind was falling apart.

  I visited my father, but he didn’t recall Justin at all. None of my own photos showed him. Every reference to him in my childhood diaries no longer existed. They hadn’t been erased – the writing was mine, the content too, but whenever I had done anything with Justin, I had now experienced it alone. It was as though Justin had never existed.

  Frantically, I booked a flight to Paris to see Alain. I held the photo in sweating hands all the way, staring at it so hard my head hurt. If only I could pierce the illusion and Justin would materialise in his familiar place.

  Just before we touched down in Paris-Orly, I looked out over the rooftops of the City of Lights and when I looked back at the photo Alain was gone too.

  The story was the same. At Alain’s flat and in every one of his familiar haunts, no one had heard of him.

  I slipped into a deep depression for a month during which I was convinced my so-called recovery had been a lie and my brain had been damaged irreparably. I tried not to think about what was happening, but it haunted my every moment. Finally, I could bear it no more. Chet was my last hope for some kind of understanding.