The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

CONRAD WILLIAMS Wait

THE SNOW HAD never really gone away. It swirled in his head, in memories of Julie’s cheap little ornament. And here was the same whitened motorway turn-off. Here the same crystallised countryside swelling against the verge. He had to stop the car at the accident site, although he had persuaded himself over the three-hour duration of his drive up here that he would not.

He parked in a lay-by and walked back. The telegraph post was no longer there. The car had almost torn it out of the ground, and might have done so had it not destroyed the passenger side of the car first.

Julie had not stood a chance.

The doctors he spoke to reassured him that she was unlikely to have felt anything, the impact was so swift, so massive. There was nothing to suggest an accident had taken place here.

Don had received a face full of broken glass, but he was otherwise unmarked. He could walk. He could get in and out of bed. He could turn his head. Everything that Julie could not. Even the cuts on his face had healed without leaving obvious scars. The scar he needed to heal was inside him. That was partly the reason for this trip. To confront the moment of his wife’s death, and to carry on to the place they had meant to be journeying. To find a way forward.

They had been a scant ten minutes away from Sheckford, that awful day. Now Don went back to the car and switched on the engine. He pulled out into the road. A blade of sunshine sliced through clouds and turned the snow golden. Apart from the streak of red far off in the distance, on one of the hills surrounding the town.

A lorry thundered by him, dragging up a great fan of slush that covered his windscreen, blinding him for a moment. His heart racing, he cleared the filth from the glass, his head full of collisions and the feel of all those icy pebbles of windscreen assaulting his face. The shock of cold air as his car was bisected. No scream. No sounds at all.

Now the red was gone from the hill. Or maybe it was a different hill, a different angle, an illusion formed by the sun and the strange refracted light coming off the crystals of snow and ice.

Maybe it was in his own eyes.

The doctor had explained to him that all that exploded glass had to go somewhere. There would have been some splinters he wouldn’t even feel. The force of the impact would have sent them into his flesh so fast, so smoothly, that there would have been no blood. There was the likelihood that he would carry minute slivers of glass around in his flesh for the rest of his life. Some survivors of bomb blasts, he was told, had suffered hundreds of tiny splinters of glass passing right through their bodies.

He was a year further away from her. He was a year closer to her.

Don would not let himself get distracted again. He completed his journey concentrating fully on his driving, checking his speed, his rear-view mirrors and keeping his hands at ten to two on the steering wheel. He let out a long, low sigh when he arrived at the hotel car park and turned the engine off. He listened to it ticking like some horrible countdown. Keep busy. Keep moving.

He got out of the car and strode past a woman holding a leash, calling into a clump of bushes for a dog that would not come. From the sounds of her, she’d been calling for some time. A red glove came up and rubbed at her face, perhaps in an attempt to coax the worry from it.

He checked into the hotel and tossed his suitcase on to the bed. The exact room they would have taken a year previously.

Why are you doing this to yourself?

He turned but of course there was nobody else in the room. He stared at the reflection of himself in the full-length mirror fitted into the panels of the wardrobe doors. The mirror was not the best quality. Red paint edged it, indicating that at some previous time it had been part of some other furniture. The tain was scarred and there was foxing in the corners. A look of shabby chic, he supposed the hotel was going for, but it appeared out of place when compared to the rest of the room, which was formal, Edwardian, verging on the cold.

“God, you’d have hated this, Ju,” he whispered.

He sat on the edge of the bed and stared at his fingers. Julie liked his fingers. She had described them as surgeon’s fingers, as early as their first date. He could do nothing for her, though, with these delicate fingers. He could not stave off death. He couldn’t find the life in her and coax it back, make it bloom, make it overpower the hurt that took her away. He felt bad that he had escaped with little more than bruises and shock (poor thing) while she had the life slammed from her in less than a millisecond. He wishes she were merely lost, like that dog in the bushes.

He unpacked, desultory, quietly panicked by his decision to come here. He didn’t know what to do. He had been filled with plans when he took that journey up with his wife. They were celebrating their third anniversary. Glass, ha ha. But also he’d meant this trip to be a way for them both to shed the tension that had been building up in London. Julie’s homeopathic shop in Camden had been hit hard by the recession. She relied on the Christmas shopping period to tide her over the following half-year, but trade had been anything but brisk. She had had to let one of her assistants go and, although she enjoyed a steady supply of small orders via the website, and as a practising herbalist was able to lean on the money she made from her patients, it was not enough to help them scramble out of the red. Another twelve months like this would have buried the business. Instead, they buried Julie, and all the worry over the business meant less than nothing. It was sold. It was over.

As for Don, he was teaching guitar to a class of young boys and girls at the local primary school. They had more often than not been bought the instrument for Christmas, or their birthdays, but little thought had gone into it. The parents tended to buy expensive items, without pause to consider if the guitar would be too big or small, the neck too wide for the child to be able to shape a decent barre chord. In the main his pupils had no natural aptitude. No promise. One boy had picked up the guitar like a double bass. Another had held the guitar in the correct manner but, astonishingly, had used his strumming hand to fret chords and vice versa. It was enough to make him want to restring his Gibson via their scrawny little throats.

It had been such a long time since he had relaxed, or even tried to. He stared out of the window at the square and the people milling around it. The opera house and the park were possible places to visit, but he didn’t feel like being among other people. He shaved because it ate up some time. As he did so, he thought about guitars and people. He wanted to write a song about Julie, but he didn’t know how to begin. All the great songs written by guitarists for important people in their lives. John for Julia; Eric for Conor; Joni for Kelly; George for Patti. Mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. Lovers. There ought to be something in him for Julie, but every time he thought of music, he felt guilty. How could he even begin to consider the positioning of notes on the stave when she would never again be able to do the things she loved?

He felt a twinge in his cheek and ran his finger over the skin there. He hadn’t nicked himself shaving but there was a lump in his cheek. Great, he thought, I survive a major road traffic accident only to fall foul of cancer. He checked in the mirror. Maybe the blade had taken the top off a pimple he hadn’t noticed. The edges of the lump were raised. It felt tender. He tried squeezing it, convinced now that it was filled with pus and he would have to clean it or run the risk of it becoming a boil, or worse. He stopped immediately. The slightest pressure told him that there was something solid beneath the skin.

He called down to reception and asked for ointment, plasters and painkillers. He poured vodka from the miniature in his minibar and drank it in one swallow. When the packets and pills came, brought by a young man whose expression clearly spoke of his disdain for anybody who asks for such things from room service, Don tenderly applied to his cheek some of the ointment — which contained a substance he recognised from Julie’s work in homeopathy, something that was good at drawing out foreign bodies — and placed one of the plasters over it. He stomached the pills with more vodka. He changed into a shirt and trousers, went down to the bar and had a cocktail, read the newspaper and, when the bar started to become busy, retired to his room, more than a little drunk, where he slept fitfully.

At one point during the night, he was sucked deep enough into sleep to suffer a nightmare. He dreamed he was hiding from something that was trying to sniff him out. Something that had poor eyesight, but keen olfactory organs. Something that was intensely hungry for Don.

He had hidden in a city filled with black glass. But its surfaces made poor reflections, clinging jealously to their colour as if they would reveal terrible pictures if they were allowed to clear. There was no light anywhere. Whenever Don thought he had discovered somewhere safe, cracks would appear in the glass and he would see his pursuer’s thin, long fingers, scabbed and pitted, picking through the fractures in a bid to get nearer to him, near enough to be able to swipe at Don’s clothes. This happened, finally, and he felt the fingers like needles piercing the skin of his thigh. He was swept towards the crack in the glass and unceremoniously dragged through it. He was choking on splinters. And if he looked through the thin aperture, an aperture whose edges he was unravelling messily upon, he could see the shadow of its face and the writhing puncture at its centre ringed with shattered white teeth, surely too thin and weak to be able to do all this.

“Name’s Kerner. Grant Kerner. How’s your breakfast?”

Now that Kerner had drawn attention to it, Don realised he no longer wanted his food. It was swimming in grease. The bacon was undercooked, the tomato blistered black on the outside, solid and cold in the centre. And he was still mindful of the unhealthy, yawning mouth he had witnessed in his dreams. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been hungry, or enjoyed a meal. He pushed the plate away and drew his coffee nearer. Caffeine and alcohol seemed to form the limit of his appetites these days.

Kerner was eating muesli loaded with extra whole hazelnuts and dried apricots. Don’s jaws ached just watching him.

Kerner was obviously one of those people who liked to winkle information out of people and he perhaps saw Don as something of a challenge. He kept on at him throughout Don’s second cup of coffee and while he wrapped miniature pots of jam in a serviette and stashed them in his coat pocket.

“I’m a photographer,” Kerner said, although Don had not asked him his occupation. “I take pictures of crippled things. Cars, buildings. Broken architecture. People, if I can get away with it. Things that don’t work the way they ought to. What do you do?”

Don thought of his job. For so long he had been going through the motions it was as if he was working from a script every day. In a way he was, following the slavish schedules set down by a government eager to have its target figures bolstered by achievable test results.

He showed the children how to play basic chords, the first few essentials: A, D and E, corrected them when they went wrong — which was often — and put on excruciating “musical” events for their parents to come and listen to. Interaction was at a minimum. He thought the children could see right through him, though they were all under ten years of age. He wondered if he resented them, since Julie’s death. He wondered if maybe he was taking out the fact that he was fatherless, and had never intended to be — certainly not at this age — on them.

“I’m unemployed,” Don said. He tried to think of a job so far removed from who Kerner seemed to be that he wouldn’t ask him any follow-up questions about it. “I used to work in Human Resources.”

That worked. Kerner’s smile froze a little; he nodded, gazed outside. “That your car?” he asked brightly, apparently happy to find another conversational topic.

“The Focus? Yeah.” Don closed his mouth. We used to have a Volvo. You know, safest car in the world.” Until I totalled it. And my wife.

“I drive a Lexus.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah,” Kerner said. “I like to drive gone midnight. Empty roads. Good up here. Some good roads. Hairpin bends and suchlike.”

“It’s just a metal box to get me from one place to another.” Don had bought a second-hand car a week after the accident. He forced himself into the driver’s seat. He would not allow it to lock him down. Metal boxes. Wooden boxes. Snow globes.

“Well, I must go,” Kerner said, and drained his cup. “Some good light here in the mornings. Click-click and all that. Peace out, rainbow trout.”

Don watched Kerner move through the dining room to the door. The other man was of a similar age to Don, he reckoned, but there was a world of difference in their physiques. Kerner’s limbs were slender, he was lithe and stealthy. He panthered across the room. Don hated his own rounded posture. He was all clump and jostle. Too many hours hunched over his guitar. He resolved to do something about it — cut back on the alcohol, eradicate the fast food from his diet, try to exercise more — but even as he left the hotel lobby and walked across the square to his car, he knew this would never be the case. Some people were born to the shape they would occupy all their lives.

I’m going to take you to the school I attended. I was a model pupil. Don’t laugh. I was a senior prefect. I never had a day’s absence. I took eight “O” levels and scored As for all of them.

Don sat in his car wondering how he had arrived here; the journey was a blur. It angered him that he should still be able to switch off whenever he drove, considering what had happened. He got out, stalked away from his little metal box, his mobile coffin, and loitered by the school gates. So this was his old seat of learning, Sheckford Junior. So what? It might have meant something had she been with him.

There’s the veranda where I used to sit with Belinda Smart, under our coats, feeding each other toffees. There’s the playground where Johnny Dobson fought back against Mr Addison. There’s the school field where I got ambushed on my birthday and I was egged to within an inch of my life. Now it was all just memories. Then and now. No context. His life was a flatline without detail. Bedtime stories, and not very good ones at that.

He walked along the edge of the school grounds until he reached the gym. Everything the same. Everything changed. His youth was so close sometimes, he felt he could feel it beneath his fingers. He saw himself every day in any number of mirrors, and it was Don, it was him. But a photograph from even as recent as five years ago displayed to him a massive change in how he looked. His skin greyer now, his eyebrows lighter, his eyes more sunken. But he had not seen it happen. He had been tricked.

He was a prisoner to the calendar, he realised, as we all were. He thought in little boxes that were to be ticked off and filled with things to do. Almost every day he thought back to what he had been doing ten years ago, twenty years ago, further. He lived in the past, by his diary. He was a history man, his head full of dead leaves. It was a form of reassurance, he knew. There were too many roads into the future and he didn’t like not having a map for it.

Movement. He turned and gazed out over the school fields

pelting Debbie Epstein with snow, winning the high jump and just missing out on the 800 metres title, kissing Penny Greig for the first time near the pavilion

and saw a couple gesticulating wildly at each other as they raced across the grass towards the main road. She was having to run to keep up with him, her red scarf flapping at her throat like a terrible wound. She spotted Don and pointed at him. The man’s head snapped up. Little hair. It was like a pink oval, a beige egg sitting on an elaborate eggcup. They arrowed towards him. The man was rolling his sleeves back as if setting himself for a scrap.

“Martin,” she was calling. Don shook his head, but then realised she wasn’t attempting to address him.

“Have you seen Martin?” Her voice was brittle. She was at the edge of tears.

“My boy,” the man explained, and he was full of accusation. “Our boy. He was playing in our garden on Kent Lane, just down there at the foot of the fields. Keepy-uppy. In our garden.”

“I was washing dishes,” said the woman. “I could see him. And then I went to empty the washing machine and when I came back he was gone and the back gate was swinging open.”

“Maybe he kicked his ball over the wall,” Don said.

“Martin is six,” the man said, as if that was explanation enough.

“He can’t reach the latch,” the woman said.

“I haven’t seen anyone,” Don said. “I just got here.”

The man looked him over as if Don might somehow be concealing Martin on his person. “The police,” he said at last. “We have to bring the police into this.”

“Oh, God,” the woman said. And then she screamed Martin’s name.

Don drove back to the hotel and forced himself to face up to what was going on. His coming here was nothing to do with a pilgrimage. It wasn’t a personal tribute. It was running away. All of those responsibilities back home; they’d still be there when he returned. Debts and deadlines and demands. Julie was the soft barrier that prevented him injuring himself against all that bureaucracy. She organised, she delegated, she controlled. It might have lapped around their ankles occasionally, but the water never rose around their throats, as it seemed to be doing these days.

Now Julie was gone, every day was like crashing his car. There were impacts everywhere. He missed her so desperately it was as if he could still feel the mass of her in his hands. Her smell was in every room she’d inhabited. There were shadows and shades of her in everything he owned. When the sun shone she was splintered within it; when it rained, each drop carried a fragment of her reflection.

He had tried to find that snow globe of hers, after the crash. She took it everywhere with her. It had been a gift from her childhood. A lucky token. He had wandered around in the ruins for an age until the ambulances arrived, his face dripping into the snow around the wreckage, poking with his toe amidst the mangled aluminium, the torn fabric seat covers, the shreds of her. It was gone.

This is madness, he thought now, but there was no way he could stop being dragged under. To tackle that might mean he had to force her out of his life altogether and he was not ready for it.

The stress of the afternoon was in him like hot pins. The way that poor woman had screamed for her son. It was animalistic. He could understand her need. He had wanted to howl like that, for Julie. It built up inside you. You forgot who you were.

He tried to make the room comfortable enough so that Julie might come to him in some way. He needed to be warm and clean and relaxed. He bathed and drank a glass of whisky. He put her favourite music station on the radio. He sat by the window and closed his eyes. He determined what each sound was and relegated it to the back of his mind. There was space here for her.

He felt himself slide towards sleep. But she was not there to greet him. She had not been a part of this intimate darkness since before her death. It was as if, in dying, she had ceased to exist for him during the moments when he ought to be most receptive to her. Gazing at photographs of her was like assessing a stranger. She mugged for the camera. She was never her natural self. He felt panic at the thought that, day by day, this memory of the truth was gradually leaving him. It scared him more than the nightmares that were so ready to enter that vacuum he’d created just for her.

That evening, after another challenging meal in the hotel restaurant, Don sat in the bar nursing a glass of Scotch. He’d decided on an early night and a quick escape back to London in the morning. He’d look into therapy. He’d consider a holiday away from the UK. He needed to map out his career. Find a new hobby, some new friends. Do the unthinkable. Find someone else. Why not just dig her up and spit into what’s left of her face?

“Hello again!”

“You bastard.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry. Grant, isn’t it? I’m very sorry. I was talking to myself. I was thinking about someone.”

Kerner was observing him with a mixture of scepticism and distaste.

“Really,” Don pressed. “I’m sorry. That was aimed at me, actually.”

The doubt in Kerner dissolved. Maybe he could see something in Don’s own features, his posture. Defeat, quite possibly.

“Then I apologise for interrupting you.”

“I’m glad you did. There’s only so much abuse I can put up with.”

Kerner laughed; the tension lessened. He assessed Don as if for the first time. There was a sense of him weighing up what to do next. Don could feel an invitation growing within; he was all too ready to refuse it. But he surprised himself by accepting, when Kerner asked if he would like to accompany him on a visit to Kayte’s Cavern.

They walked. It was not far. There was a place to buy tickets and tat. A café. All of it closed now. A little display, showing the history of the cave and what had been found there. Roman coins and bones and bronze brooches. Over time it had been a burial ground, a shelter, and the hideaway for a robber, the eponymous Nathaniel Kayte, who used the darkness and the depth and the churning noise of the water sluicing through it to his advantage when hiding from his pursuers.

Later it was a tourist trap. People travelled great distances to see the flowstone curtains, the stalactites and stalagmites, the great chambers of pale crystal, glowing in the dark as if lit from within. After that it became a big draw for the Victorians, who were led by candlelight deep into the cavern and then, the flames blown out by their canny guides, asked for more money if they wished to be taken back to safety.

“Isn’t it a bit late for this?” Don asked again. “I thought you meant we’d go in the morning.”

“Caves are dark whether the sun’s shining or the moon’s up, no?” Kerner said. “My mate’s on duty tonight. We can get in without paying. And anyway, the cavern’s closed while they do some exploratory digging. I think they’re going to go deep. Open up some new chamber that has never before been seen by human eyes.” Kerner deepened his voice at this last sentence, turning to Don and peering at him with theatrical menace.

“What’s your interest in this place?” Don asked Kerner as a black-clad figure in a peaked cap swung open the gates and directed them to the cavern’s mouth. “I thought you photographed broken things.”

“Not exclusively. Anyway, I’m not working. I might not even switch my camera on.”

There were signs saying NO ENTRY and DANGER. Another which read CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC UNTIL JANUARY. Don felt a pang of claustrophobia when he saw the size of the entrance. He would have to bend over slightly, and then the gap narrowed and the ceiling came down further and it was as if he were being swallowed by some gigantic, scabrous throat.

When the cave was first discovered, back in the 1500s (Kerner explained), long before explosives were used to blast a more comfortable passage, you had to crawl through on your belly.

Don felt water drip on to his neck. He could feel the damp in the air. There were footlights guiding you into the cavern along a concretised strip, but then the cave floor took over and it was uneven, treacherous. There was a giddy moment when he wasn’t sure if he was even the right way up.

We become so used to flatness, to stability, he almost said to Kerner. The horizon and the vertical. Take the straight lines away and we lose direction.

Kerner seemed to have no such problem. The bigger man bustled through the gap as if he were pushing himself to the front of the queue on sale day.

“Shouldn’t we have a guide?” Don asked.

“No guides for us,” Kerner said. “I know this place like the back of my gland. I slipped Mac back there a tenner. He’s happy to warm his hands on another cup of tea. We’re doing his patrol for him. We’re doing a public duty.”

Don didn’t like that. He had never strayed too far away from the rules. Even when teaching, he stuck to the tried and tested. A gradual accumulation of knowledge. A natural progression. Chords. Barre chords. Finger-picking. Scales. Power chords and riffs were not on his syllabus. It was lazy. It was a fast-track to sloppy playing. You had to have the foundation. Deep roots. Core. He was an oak, Don decided now, enjoying the analogy. It was distracting him from the pressing in of the cave walls. He was an oak to Kerner’s weak bough, flapping in the wind.

“You’ve been in here before then?” Don asked, to stop himself from laughing.

“Many times. I could serve as a guide myself, I reckon.”

“Do you have a torch?” The entrance lights only illuminated so far. Up ahead, the blackness was deeper than anything Don had ever known. He had never thought of the dark possessing a physicality, but that’s what it seemed like. There was substance in it. You’d be forgiven for thinking you had to pierce some part of it in order to get through at all.

“We don’t need a torch,” Kerner said.

“What are you, part owl?”

Kerner chuckled. And then light exploded around them. Don felt suddenly foolish. The space within the cavern was voluminous. The ceiling of it was sixty, seventy feet from where they were standing. Its geology seemed a living thing. It was sinuous in some places, jagged in others. He sensed Kerner watching him, his finger on a light switch hidden behind a curtain of rock.

“Timer switch,” Kerner said. “Switches off automatically, after a while. This place closed down in the 1950s. Lack of interest. Nobody to fund it. It was taken over in the 1970s. Given a real spring clean. They put in the electricity then. No more of those dodgy gas lamps the Victorians used.”

“The rock,” Don said. He wasn’t sure what he meant to follow that with. It seemed anything he might say would not do justice to his surroundings.

“Amazing, isn’t it?”

“That it is.”

“Limestone, in the main,” Kerner said, clearly relishing his role. “You’re looking at rock that was formed around three hundred and fifty million years ago, when modest little Derbyshire was part of a continental landmass close to the equator. Volcanic activity pushed the limestone up and into the fractures that were created, hot minerals poured. So you’ve got your galena, your flourspar, your barytes, your calcite. Veins and seams. Ore. This glittering wonderland. This cave was formed by water. Rain becomes acidic when it passes through organic matter, like soil, as I’m sure you know. It dissolved the limestone. Streams eroded it further. You can hear the water crashing through. We’ll see it up ahead. All this water coming through here, it’s been going on for two million years.”

My God, thought Don. He thought of Julie. She would have loved this. She had been dead for one year. The water coming through here, it was difficult to imagine it would ever stop. It would still be sluicing through two million years hence. The cave wider, deeper, but essentially the same. People coming and going so quickly, like glyphs on the pages of a flicker book.

The colours were amazing. Blues and greys and greens. Orange heating up to red. Stalagmites reached up to stalactites, fangs in a closing jaw.

“How big is the cave?”

“Who knows,” Kerner said. “It extends further than anybody thought. Come on, I’ll show you.”

They advanced through the cave, and it expanded around them. Handrails and steps had been put in. The electric lights, subtly positioned, showed off the ripples and thrusts of rock while ensuring there was no chance of becoming lost. Behind them, the lights shut off, like portions of a stage during a play. It was all very dramatic.

Don gradually relaxed. Kerner was a knowledgeable and amiable guide and Don grew to become grateful for his company. They walked through various sections, separated by natural kinks in the path they were following; all were given grandiose names: Hall of the Kings, The Chamber of Hanging Knives, Grey Lion’s Lair. The names were attributed to the shapes in the rock. Some looked like crowns, or daggers, or a flowing mane. It was like hunting for faces in the fire, or the clouds.

The path ran out at a boulder choke surrounded with safety rails and more threatening red signs. Don had been so engaged by the alien surroundings, the assault of the cold and the clean, mineral flavour in his nostrils and throat, that he’d completely forgotten about the lump on his cheek. But now, as its pain re-announced itself to him, he stopped and pressed his hand to his skin.

“Okay?” Kerner asked.

“Yeah, just. I don’t know. Spot or something.”

“Oh, I noticed that too, but I didn’t say anything.”

Don tried to laugh it off but the sound came out all wrong. Beautiful place, unkind acoustics. “I’m turning into a teenager again,” he said.

“You should maybe see a doctor. It might be an infection. You don’t want it to become an abscess or anything like that. They’ll have to cut a big chunk out of you. Bad scars. I have photographs of people, post-op. People who had tumours. One guy who was bitten by a flea or a tick or something. Half his face turned rotten, virtually slid off him. Imagine that.”

Don tried to ignore him. He removed the sticking plaster from his skin and pushed ahead, leaving Kerner to his study of a small, visible stretch of churning water. His fingers fretted at the sore. The surrounding skin was puffed up and tender. There was a hard core beneath. It wobbled under the dome of taut skin, making him queasy. Maybe it was the air pressure that was nagging at it. Or the cold. Something was being drawn out. Maybe it was just time. The body healed itself of most things, given enough time.

“Look, see,” Kerner said. He was pointing at a small hole in a cluster of rocks at the foot of the choke. “They dropped cameras through that last year and found a huge. I don’t know how you’d describe it. amphitheatre of white rock. They dubbed it ‘the blizzard bowl’. Crystal city. Like landing in one of those daft ornaments, you know. What are they called?”

“Snow globes,” Don whispered.

“Snow globes, yeah. That’s the chappy. Anyway, the idea is they’re going to send a man down there. Apparently there’s a guy known as Rat lives in the village. Spelunker extraordinaire. He can squirm his way into holes like that. No fear in him. He’s going to see what’s what and then they’re going to open the whole thing up. I mean, it’s anyone’s guess. How far can you go? There might be worlds upon worlds beyond that blizzard bowl. Who knows what we might find? There are new species being discovered every day in the rainforests.”

There was a moment, just as the lights were turned off, and they began the walk back to the cavern entrance, when Don thought he heard the scrabble of movement, but he chose not to mention it, because he didn’t want to appear nervous, or stupid to Kerner. The slide of insecure pebbles. A rat, or a bat. It was nothing.

“Let’s have a pic,” Kerner said, when they were outside. He got Mac to take a photograph of them, standing in front of the cavern entrance, and then they were ushered out of the grounds and it was much colder out here and the stars were studs of glass scattered across an oily hard shoulder.

“Nightcap?” Kerner asked.

Don shook his head. “I’m wiped,” he said. “Thanks for an interesting evening.”

“Sad to leave ya, Eurasian beaver.”

“Good night.”

Again. Did it become a ritual if it happened more than once?

A hot bath. The Scotch. The music she loved, Joni Mitchell. He mustered the memory of the smells that made her who she was. Tea tree oil. Fennel. He thought back to the last time they had made love. The flush of red on her chest. The eyes closing. The quickening of her breath. Don, Don.

Sleep was over him and around him, closing, like a thin blanket, but it was not yet in him. His breath deepened. His eyes rolled back. He submitted himself. Sleep sank into him like something taking a bite. And just at the moment he felt himself go under, he was aware, in the dark, of a shape at the foot of his bed. It was heart-shaped, a muted grey, and it took a while to understand that it was the shape of someone’s back: the arms and head lost to shadow. Slowly, it shifted. He heard the shiver of nylon moving against itself. He saw the nubs of vertebrae in a spine curve subtly against the fabric of a cardigan. And it was her cardigan. His heart leaped. Until:

Why are you doing this?

He flinched. Her voice was too close, as if she were whispering in his ear. And there was something wrong with it. She sounded as though she was thirsty. The voice, full of holes.

I love you but you have to let me go don’t blame yourself

“Julie? Julie, what can I do? Where are you?” He stared at the figure at the end of the bed as it stretched and writhed. “Don’t leave me. It was so sudden.”

I have to go I want to go to the white I want to run through the snow you can set me free

The shush of her nylons. but she never wore tights.

“Julie?” He jerked upright in bed, blinking himself awake. The shape toppled forward, turning. Her hair fell across her face so he could see only a sliver of gleaming eye through the mouse blonde bands of it. She raised her thin limbs and showed him where she’d cut through the veins of her arms with the shattered remnants of her snow globe.

The blood hissing like water from punctured hoses, eternal.

I’d have killed myself anyway, eventually. don’t blame yourself

In the second it took him to wrench himself free of the bedclothes, winter sunshine was streaming through the window and his alarm clock was droning and she was gone. He turned back to see his pillow, streaked with red. A pebble of glass sitting there like something the tooth fairy had forgotten to collect.

“Woah, pal. Easy. What bit you this morning?”

Don had dropped his glass of cranberry juice. He watched the spreading red stain around his breakfast plates and tried to stop his hands from shaking. Surely everyone could see that. They’d think he’d been drinking at daybreak. Or that he had something terrible to hide. Kerner watched him while he chewed his interminable muesli. His question hung in the air. Don ignored it.

He poured coffee and tried to hide in its steam. The plaster on his face felt tight and itchy, but he wasn’t going to sit there with a wet hole flapping in front of all these people while they tucked into their grilled tomatoes.

After his shower that morning he’d noticed there were other points on his face beginning to flare up. Most worryingly, there was an ache building behind his left eye. Another in his chest. The windscreen had shattered into a million pieces. How many of them had disappeared inside him? How many were now worming their way out, rejected by his flesh after the slow journey of a year? In the horror of it, came the thrill. The glass might have connected him to his wife. What if, as he had read once, it was possible for slivers of glass to pass through your body? Perhaps some of them had become embedded in her. He was in her, then, after a fashion. And now that he was here, in Sheckford, some numinous frequency, made in blood, had been opened between them. It was the kind of thing she believed in. The end was never the end. We were all passengers in transit.

“There’s something wrong with my camera,” Kerner said. “Just found out this morning.”

“I think there’s a camera shop in the village. Maybe they’d have a look at it for you.” Don hated the sound of his own voice. It was weak, pathetic, more so since his eventful night.

“Not this. Specialist job, I reckon. Fault somewhere. And not with my picture-taking abilities, for once. It’s as if I’d forgotten to take the film out and rewound it and taken more exposures over the top.”

“Have you checked that?”

Kerner gave him a look. He checked his watch. “Hmm,” he said. “Says here that it’s still the twenty-first century. That must mean I’ve got a digital camera.”

The sudden, spearing conclusion that he didn’t like Kerner. Don was glad his camera was knackered. He hoped it would cost him a fortune to repair it.

“Look, see,” Kerner said, pushing his bowl to one side and setting the expensive camera on the table. He pressed a few buttons and the screen on the rear flashed up a picture: the one Mac had taken the previous evening.

Don came around the table and squinted at the glass oblong. “Christ,” he said.

The two of them, standing in front of the cavern entrance, the blue guide lights set into the floor illuminating them from below, giving them an unhealthy, cyanotic glow. Shadows falling on the uneven rock behind them: Kerner’s, Don’s, and someone else’s.

“See that?”

“Yeah. It can’t be Mac’s shadow, can it?”

“Hey?” Kerner leaned in closer. “I hadn’t actually noticed that. I was talking about that. glow, in your chest.”

Now Don saw it. In roughly the position where his heart might be, a fist-sized lump of grainy light, like the diffuse aura cast by a sodium street-lamp. He pressed his fingers to his breastbone.

“What could it be?” he asked. His voice sounded perilously close to choking. Tears ganged up. But Kerner seemed not to notice.

“Could just be some hot pixels on the sensor, maybe. Maybe a lens problem. But I have some pictures I took before and after, and they seem clean. That shadow you point out though. it’s obvious something’s not right. Bollocks. It’s quality glass that. Spent a fortune on it. ”

“I have to go,” Don said.

Kerner nodded, smiled. His fingers fidgeted with the buttons on the camera body. “Adieu, caribou.”

Go home. Leave this place. Let it sink into time, let it become a fossil in your memory.

But how could it? This was as much Julie’s place as his now. They were inextricably linked by Sheckford, the things that happened to them here.

He was back in his room, standing in front of the mirror, his shirt off, staring at his chest, willing the glow to reappear. It’s you, isn’t it? Julie?

He switched on the light and his breath caught. Two shadows. But one was merely a copy of the other, bounced back by the silvered glass. He pressed his fingers against his skin and felt something hard. It was like a swelling. All of the other hotspots of pain in his skin sang out. He buttoned his shirt and returned to the bedroom. There was a sense of someone having just departed. The mattress seemed to be rising slightly, where it might have cushioned a body moments before. There was a slight shift in the temperature of the room. A microscopic change in its pressures.

I want to go to the white I want to run through the snow

The crystal snow globe had been so important to her. It had been with her for much of her life, and it had helped to end it too. She had often told him how lovely it would be to live in a snow globe, to be protected from all the evils in the outside world by that perfect glass. The silence, the beauty.

He was out of the hotel and walking hard along the street before he had any concrete notion of where he was heading.

His mind was filled with white.

Mac let him through the gate but was unsympathetic when Don told him he might have lost his car keys in the cavern. “It’s not really my job to go hunting for lost property. I’m a security guard.”

“I’ll go,” Don said.

“I don’t think so. This isn’t a drive-through restaurant. You don’t just pop back whenever you feel like it.”

A twenty-pound note changed his mind.

Don steeled himself at the entrance, but only because the pain in his chest ramped up a notch. It was like heartburn, only a hundred times worse. He thought he might retch, but nothing would come when he leaned over. Something felt sharp just beneath the skin. Something was coming.

He could hear the water ploughing over and under and through the rock as it had done for so many millions of years. It had churned through this cavern at the moment of his birth and at the moment of Julie’s death. He staggered along the pathway, grateful for its enormous sound; it meant he did not have to listen to his own skin tearing open.

He reached the boulder choke and stared at the foot of it, where the tiny opening was like a pupil in a dead eye. He imagined great acres of untouched white crystal beyond it, like a field of virgin snow before the children have wakened, like Heaven.

“Julie?” he called out, but his voice was unable to best the roar. It hurt too much to try again. He felt his chest fail, and lifted his hands as if he might prevent himself from tipping out on the cold, wet path. What was there in his chest cut his hand. Blood sped from him, slicking his fingers. It was difficult now, to find purchase on the slippery curve of the glass in him.

He saw movement at the lip of the aperture. Julie? But of course it wasn’t. What could he have hoped from this? Julie was cold and dead as the piece of glass within him.

Long, white nails attached to long white fingers. The skin of something eternally damp, of something that had never known sunlight. It skittered out, all elbows and fish-thin ribs pulsing beneath translucency. A sore-looking jaw, red-rimmed, loaded with icy needles that glittered like Hoar frost, splinters of the missing packed between them. It made a sound that was almost beyond a frequency audible to him. It sounded like metal scraped across glass. It turned an eye to him that was as pale as moonstones.

Don turned to run, but his foot slid in his own filth. The chunk in his chest shifted. As he gripped it and pulled, closing his eyes to the terrible suck as the glass came free, the lights went out and it fell on him, all too keen to lend him its assistance.