by Ellen Datlow
The server returns with Sarah’s drink, asks me if I’d like more coffee. I decline. “If you need anything,” she says, and leaves.
“All right,” Sarah says after tasting her drink. “How should we do this?”
“Why don’t we start with a question: Why now? Why wait ten years to reveal this new information? Wouldn’t it have been simpler to do so back when the movie was first released?”
“Possibly,” Sarah says. “I don’t know. At the time, Isabelle and I weren’t on speaking terms. We still aren’t, but then, it was new. We’d had this massive fight—things didn’t just turn ugly, they turned hideous. Everything felt pretty raw. Part of me did want to go public with the documentary stuff, but it was mostly because I thought it would hurt Isabelle. She was back at graduate school, trying to pull together a dissertation. If word got out that she’d been part of this crazy documentary project, I figured it would make her study less pleasant.
“For once in my life, though, I listened to my inner Jiminy Cricket and did the right thing. For a long time after that, I was so busy, I didn’t have time to think about the footage. Really, when I sat down for the interview with Rue Morgue, I had no intention of mentioning any of that stuff. It just…came out. I don’t see the harm in it, now. I mean, Isabelle left her doctoral program, didn’t she? Isn’t she a massage therapist or something?”
“Yoga instructor,” I say. “But you have to admit—”
“The timing is highly suspicious, yes. I can’t blame anyone who thinks that. It’s what I would say.”
“You, however, have the original documentary.”
Sarah nods. “I do.” She raises the laptop’s screen. “The problem is, we’re living in an age where it’s easy to fake stuff like this. If you have the resources, you can put together something that would fool everyone up to and maybe including the experts. Although, why would you want to?” She lifts a hand to forestall my answer. “Yeah, publicity, I know. It’s a case of diminishing returns. If all I was after was to generate interest in the movie, I would have ended my story saying that the original footage was lost, wiped when my computer crashed. It wouldn’t be worth whatever meager spike in sales you might project for me to go to the trouble of creating a new fake film.”
“Which is exactly the sort of thing I’d expect you to say, if you were trying to pass off a fake movie as authentic.”
“Yeah,” she says, sweeping her fingers over the computer’s touch pad to bring it to life. “The thing is, if you want to believe something’s a conspiracy, you will. No matter what I say, one way or the other, it’ll be evidence of what you’re looking for.”
“Fair enough.”
“Okay.” She taps keys and turns the computer ninety degrees, allowing me a view of the screen. The window open shows a woman’s head and shoulders foreground right, the entrance to the mine background left. It’s Isabelle Router, her face burnished by the same late-afternoon sunlight that paints the rock face behind her bronze. “This is how we began,” Sarah says. “Isabelle standing in front of the mine, reciting the history of the mystery woman. We could watch it, but you already know the story, right?”
“Right.”
“Let’s…” She fast-forwards ten minutes. We’re inside the mine, rough rock walls and ceiling, scattered trash on the floor. To anyone who’s seen Lost in the Dark, it’s a familiar shot, although the voices are different. Somewhere off screen to the right, Chad Singer is saying, “Am I going to have to carry this for very long? Because it is heavy.” From what sounds as if it might be behind the camera, George Maltmore is muttering about the acoustics of this damn place. Much closer, Kristi Nightingale says, “Eww,” at the desiccated carcass of a small animal, likely a mouse. “We had to swap out the soundtrack for something more atmospheric,” Sarah says to me. “Plus, Chad had left, so we couldn’t use his voice.” She pauses the video. “There’s plenty more of this kind of thing I can show you, if that’s what you want.” She advances five minutes, to the crew encountering a piece of Jack Kirby–esque machinery the approximate dimensions of a refrigerator, its yellow paint faded and flaked away in patches, the large round openings in its sides strung with cobwebs. A leap of another six minutes brings us to the comic relief of the ancient Playboy, its cover and interior pages crumpled. The crew’s jokes approximate those in the later film. Ten minutes more down the dark tunnel brings the first surprise of the interview, the portrait of a woman’s face on the rock wall. It’s exactly as it appears in Lost in the Dark. Despite myself, I flinch, say, “Jesus. This is for real?”
“It’s what we found,” Sarah says.
I stare at the waves of the woman’s hair, the lines of her cheekbones and nose, the weird smearing on the right-hand side of the drawing, which gives the left half of the face a roughly skeletal appearance. I fight the urge to reach my fingers to the screen. “I assumed—I mean, I know Isabelle’s uncle mentioned it in his story, but I figured he invented it.”
“Me too,” Sarah says. “It seemed hard to believe, didn’t it? Like something out of a horror movie.”
“Who did it?” I can’t stop looking at the portrait, which is in some ways no different from what I’ve seen previously, and in other ways has been fundamentally changed. Stranger still, the portrait’s resemblance to Isabelle remains as strong as ever. “I mean, did Isabelle have any friends who were artists?”
“She swore it wasn’t her,” Sarah says. She lets the movie play. The camera pans from the tunnel wall to Isabelle, who is not pleased. “Very funny,” she says.
“What do you mean?” Kristi says.
“You think I don’t know who this is?”
“Isabelle,” Sarah says, “we didn’t do this.”
“Yeah, right,” Isabelle says.
“Seriously,” Kristi says.
“You think we had something to do with this?” Priya Subramani says.
“Obviously,” Isabelle says. “How else do you explain it?”
“Um, someone drew it,” Chad says. “Someone who isn’t one of us.”
“Are you sure?” Isabelle says.
“Yeah,” Chad says. “When my friends say they didn’t do something, I believe them.”
“What would be the point?” Sarah says. “Why would we do this, and then lie to you about it?”
Doubt softens Isabelle’s features, but already, she’s invested too much in the argument to yield the point. Plus, she doesn’t want to contemplate the implications of the crew telling the truth. She says, “Whatever,” and turns away.
The camera swings to Sarah, who blows out through pursed lips while rolling her eyes.
“Probably should have omitted that last bit,” she says, tapping the touch pad and freezing the screen. “After we returned from the mine and were going through the footage, Kristi suggested that maybe Isabelle was responsible for the drawing. I told her there was no way, she was being ridiculous. Had she not seen Isabelle’s reaction to the thing? When the group of us met to screen what Kristi and I had put together, she asked Isabelle about the portrait point-blank. I didn’t stop her. I’ll admit: I was curious. Isabelle acted genuinely surprised at the accusation, enough for me to believe her. Although, when I think about her performance in Lost in the Dark, how well she acted, I wonder.”
“Why would she have done that?”
“To back up the story that had brought us there in the first place,” Sarah says.
“I don’t know,” I say. “That seems like a little far to go.”
“Well.” Sarah brings the movie ahead another ten minutes, hurrying the crew through a pair of large spaces whose flat ceilings rest on rock columns the girth of large trees. In the second chamber, their flashlights pick out a shape to the right, a dark mound like a heap of rugs. Flashlights trained on the thing, they cross the space toward it. As they approach, the mound gains definition, resolving into the carcass of a large animal. When they reach it, Sarah returns the film to normal speed.
“—is it?” Chad is
saying.
“I think it’s a bear,” Sarah says.
“No way,” Kristi says.
“There are bears here?” Priya says.
“Yes,” George says, “black bears.” He steps away from the group to circle the remains.
“Be careful,” Priya says.
“Yeah, George,” Chad says, “watch yourself.”
“Relax,” George says. “This fellow’s been dead a long time.” He crouches next to the bear’s blunt head, playing his light back and forth over it. His eyes narrow. “What the hell?”
“What?” Sarah says.
“What is it?” Priya says.
“From the looks of things,” George says, “something tore out Gentle Ben here’s throat.”
“Is that strange?” Chad says.
“What could do that?” Kristi says.
“I have no idea,” George says. “Another bear, maybe. A mountain lion, I guess.”
“Hang on—I want to see this,” Kristi says. The camera moves around the animal’s prostrate form to where George sits on his heels, his flashlight directed at the bear’s head. Its eyes are sunken, shriveled, its teeth bared in a final snarl. The right canine is missing, the socket ragged, black with blood long crusted. What should be the animal’s thick neck is a mess of skin torn into leathery ribbon and flaps, laying bare dried muscle and dull bone. “Jesus,” Kristi says.
“Should be more blood,” George says. He sweeps his flashlight over the floor around them, whose dust and rock are unstained. “Huh.”
“What does that mean?” Priya says.
“Could it be, I don’t know, poachers?” Chad says.
“Black bear isn’t protected like that,” George says. “You’re supposed to have a license, but if you shot one by mistake, you wouldn’t need to go to this amount of trouble to hide it. Not to mention, I don’t know what gun would inflict this type of wound.”
“Maybe it was shot,” Chad says, “came in here to escape, and another bear got it.”
George shrugs. “Anything’s possible. Doesn’t explain the lack of blood, though.”
“I do not like this,” Kristi says.
“Hey,” Priya says, “where’s Isabelle?”
Sarah pauses the movie.
“What happened to Isabelle?” I say.
“She…wandered off,” Sarah says.
“In a mine?”
“Yeah,” Sarah says, “that was what the rest of us thought.”
“Where did she go?”
“All the way to the end of the mine, and then farther. There’s a network of caves the mine connects to. We spent most of the shoot searching for her—about fifteen hours.” The next twenty minutes of the film advance in a succession of scenes, each of which leaps ahead another half hour to hour and a half. The expression on the crew’s faces oscillate between irritation and worry, with intermittent stops at fatigue and unease. Sarah says, “We hadn’t brought much in the way of food or drink; we hadn’t expected to be down there for more than a couple of hours. We ran out of both pretty quickly. Not long after, Chad floated the idea of turning around, heading for the surface, where we could call for help, bring in some professionals to find Isabelle. Kristi was aghast at the thought of abandoning her here. The others agreed. We kept on moving farther underground. Isabelle had left enough of a trail for us to follow; although there were a couple of times we really had to search for it. Finally, we arrived at this spot.”
She taps the touch pad. The screen shows the tunnel dead-ending in a shallow chamber filled with junk: rows of rusted barrels, any identifying marks long flaked off; cardboard boxes in various stages of mildewed collapse; shovels and pickaxes, mummified in dusty cobwebs; a stack of eight or nine safety helmets leaning to one side.
“Shit,” Sarah says.
“What do we do now?” Chad says.
“Go back,” George says, “see if we can pick up the trail again at that last fork.”
“Hang on,” Kristi says. The view moves behind the row of barrels closest to the wall. As the camera’s light shifts, so do the barrels’ shadows, swinging away from the rock to reveal a short opening in it. “Guys,” Kristi says, bringing the camera level with her discovery. Manhole-sized and -shaped, the aperture admits to a brief passage, which ends in darkness.
“What is it?” Sarah says.
“Some kind of tunnel,” Kristi says. The opening swims closer.
“What are you doing?” Sarah says.
“Wait,” Kristi says. The screen rocks wildly as she crawls through the passage.
“Hey!” George calls.
Kristi emerges into a larger space. Curved walls expand to a wider exit. The camera scans the floor, which is strewn with an assortment of stones. A rough path pushes through them. “Guys!” Kristi shouts.
The film jumps to Priya scrambling out of the tunnel. Chad helps her to her feet. To the left, George says, “Is everyone sure about this?”
“No,” Chad says.
“I don’t know,” Priya says.
“Do you want to abandon Isabelle down here,” Kristi says, “in the dark?”
“It’s worth checking out,” Sarah says. “We’ll go a little way. If we don’t see any sign of her, we’ll turn around.”
“What the fuck is she doing here?” Priya says.
“When we find Isabelle,” Sarah says, “we’ll ask her.”
Another cut, and the crew is standing in blackness that extends beyond the limits of their flashlights. Ceiling, walls are out of view; only the rock on which they’re standing is visible. Chad and Kristi shout, “Hello!” and, “Isabelle!” but any echo is at best faint. “Where are we?” Priya says. No one answers.
In the following scene, an object shines in the distance, on the very right edge of the screen. “Hey,” Kristi says, turning the camera to center the thing, “look.” The rest of the crew’s lights converge on it.
“What…?” Priya says.
“It looks like a tooth,” Sarah says.
“It’s a stalagmite,” George says. “Or stalactite. I get the two confused. Either way, it isn’t a tooth.”
“It’s not a stalagmite,” Chad says. “The surface texture’s wrong. Besides, you usually find stalagmites and stalactites in pairs, groups, even. Where are the others?”
“So what is it, Mr. Geologist?” George says.
“It’s a rock,” Kristi says.
It is, though both Sarah’s and George’s identifications are understandable. Composed of some type of white, pearlescent mineral, it stands upright, three and a half, four feet tall, tapering from a narrow base to a flattened top the width of a tea saucer. Halfway down it, there’s a decoration, which, when the camera zooms in on it, resolves into a picture. Executed in what might be charcoal, it’s a face, the features rendered simply, crudely. In the scribble of black hair, the black hole of the left eye, it isn’t hard to recognize the repetition of the portrait near the mine’s entrance. “What the fuck?” Kristi says.
“What is this?” Priya says. “What is happening here?”
“Um,” Chad says. The view draws back from the face to show Chad standing beside the stone, in the process of picking up something from its flattened top. Frowning, he raises a thin, shriveled item to view. “I think this is a finger.”
“Jesus Christ,” Kristi says. “Are you sure?”
“No,” he says, replacing the digit gingerly, as if it might shatter.
“What the hell is this?” George says.
“We need to leave,” Priya says. “Right now, we need to leave.”
“I think she might be right,” Kristi says.
“Just a little farther,” Sarah says. “Please. I know this is—this is scary, I know. But please…We can’t leave Isabelle here. Please.”
“What makes you think she’s even in this place?” George says.
“I do not want to be here anymore,” Priya says. “We have to leave.”
“Sarah,” Kristi says.
With
out another word, Sarah walks past the strange rock in the direction the crew was heading, her flashlight spreading its beam across the floor in front of her.
“Hey!” Kristi says.
“What is she doing?” Chad says.
“Making a command decision,” George says.
“Are we going to follow her?” Chad says.
“What choice do we have?” Kristi says. “We already lost Isabelle.” The camera moves after Sarah.
From behind, Priya says, “This is so unfair.”
After the next cut, the screen shows Sarah a half-dozen steps in front of the crew, trailing her light through blackness. “Sarah,” Kristi says. “Wait up.” The others join her in calling Sarah’s name, urging her to slow down. “Come on!” Priya says.
When Sarah stops, it isn’t because of the requests directed at her. Her light slides over the cave floor to her left, illuminating a low line of dark rocks. As she changes direction toward it, so do the others, aiming their lights at her destination. “What now?” George says.
Less than a foot tall, the line is composed of stones fist sized and smaller. They’re black, porous, distinct from the rock on which they’re arranged. At either end, the row connects to a shorter line of the same rock, each of which joins another longer row of rocks, forming a rectangle the dimensions of a large door. The space within it sparkles and flashes in the lights. Chad kneels and reaches into the rectangle, toward the nearest piece of dazzle, only to snatch his hand back with a “Shit!”
“What is it?” Priya says.
“Glass,” Chad says, holding his fingers to display the blood welling from their tips. “It’s filled with broken glass.” He sticks his fingers into his mouth.
“Fuck,” Kristi says.
“What does this mean?” Priya says.
“Yeah, Sarah,” Kristi says, “what the fuck is this?”
“I—” Sarah starts, but George interrupts her: “Shh! Hear that?”
“What?” Kristi says.
“I do,” Priya says.
“What?” Chad says.