New Fears 2: Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

EMERGENCE Tim Lebbon

Sometimes it’s turning left or right that changes your life. Sometimes it’s staring straight ahead, not paying attention to what’s around you in case it’s dangerous, or unpleasant, or something you wouldn’t want to go to sleep that night remembering. On occasion closing your eyes and just standing still will alter everything, because as the world parts and flows around you, you cannot help but feel its tides.

Sometimes, it’s recognising that a place you once thought of as normal really, really isn’t.

That was why I went closer to the tunnel. I’m naturally curious, and hidden places fascinate me as much as paths that lead away from the beaten track. I like to explore. I don’t know why it was that particular day and hour, but something about it drew me when I passed. It could be that I glimpsed the skull from the corner of my eye. Maybe it was the smell.

I’d climbed this steep path and run back down it thirty or forty times. It was a favourite run of mine, starting with a solid, unrelenting thousand-foot climb from the small car park to the top of the mountain, then a good trail run around the summit until I descended back down to the car. I’d cover seven or eight miles and spend two hours on my own, just me and the wild and the breeze, the views and the sheep, the sense that I was alone in a wilderness only barely touched by humankind. It was glorious.

Halfway down the heavily wooded lower portion of the slope, I skidded to a stop and stood staring at the tunnel mouth. I was panting, sweating, and I couldn’t quite explain the draw it had over me. I’d glanced at it a dozen times before but never gone closer than this. It was little more than an arch of rough brickwork, partly broken away by years of plant growth and frost damage, half-buried by leaf falls and tumbled tree branches, and enclosing a half-moon of deep darkness that seemed to lead nowhere. I’d often wondered why it was there and who had built it. I assumed it was the remains of an old drainage culvert constructed by some farmer or landowner long ago. The hillsides were scattered with such remnants, evidence of past labours that seemed to serve little or no purpose. It was something else that attracted me to places like this.

I climbed the small bank and moved closer. The darkness inside didn’t feel intimidating, I wasn’t afraid, but it was deep and heavy, like a weight luring me down. In the shadow of the brick overhang was a skull, picked clean by birds and insects. It sat on a carpet of old leaves and twigs. Scattered around were smaller bones, the shattered remains of whatever creature had come there to die. A sheep, probably. I’d seen them before, corpses taken apart amongst the heathers and ferns of the wild hillsides. The skull was smallish, and there were scraps of wool snagged on brambles and rolled into dirty clumps. A lamb, then. I wondered what had killed the poor creature.

I edged closer and saw more of the tunnel mouth. It was strange seeing such skilled brickwork in this wild place, and I tried to imagine the people who had worked there. It must have been an effort lugging bricks and mortar up the steep slope, and the purposes of the tunnel still eluded me. It was set deep into a steep bank, trees growing above it. I could see heavy roots dangling down inside, and dislodged bricks littered the ground.

The entrance was half-buried by years of leaf falls, much of it turned to mulch and providing home to ferns and on one side a bramble bush.

I dug into the hip pocket of my rucksack and pulled out my head torch. The batteries were new, but I paused just for a second before turning it on, wondering how long it had been since the tunnel’s interior had been touched by light.

I looked down at the skull close to my left knee. “So what were you doing here?” I asked. For a second afterwards, the silence was loaded. I laughed and turned on the torch.

It revealed no surprises inside. The curved ceiling sloped down, as did the floor, the tunnel burrowing gently beneath the bank. There were more fallen bricks, plants, dead leaves, a few pieces of lonely litter either dropped there by snacking hikers or blown by the wind. I played the light around, crouching in an effort to see further. I already knew I was going to venture inside.

When I was a kid, two friends and I found the remains of an old air-raid shelter close to some allotments, left over from when a row of houses had been demolished. We’d all got cuts and bruises from going down there, and Gavin had ended up in hospital having a gashed thigh sewn up. But we’d all come out with something too. I still had the old gas mask I’d found in its cloth bag, tucked away in the attic at home where plenty of old memories withered and faded.

Faded until something like this brought them crashing back again.

I remembered Jimmy’s taunting when the three of us were egging each other on, all afraid, all trying to be brave enough to go first. Gavin had been the brash one, but his fear of the dark had made itself apparent. We’d gone exploring down there three times before Gavin slashed his leg open on a ragged shard of metal protruding from the old brick wall. They were good times. I hadn’t seen either of them in over fifteen years.

“Not worth it,” I said, glancing down at the sheep’s skull one more time. It grinned up at me. Maybe I’d seen this creature alive on an earlier run that year. A memory of me might once have resided within its now-empty cranium.

I put the head torch around my head to free up both hands, then slipped feet-first into the low tunnel.

Enveloped by the tunnel’s darkness, everything felt very different. The smells of the hillside changed, becoming wet and dank, the scent of old things and decay. As I made my way down the gentle slope, my boots dislodged clumps of mud and rocks, and the rich fug of darkness rose around me. The cool, wet ground soaked through my long-sleeved T-shirt, and my shorts were soon heavy with mud.

I shone the torch all around, moving slowly, checking the tunnel structure above and around me, and the floor ahead. I probed with my boot, digging at the ground in case any holes had been covered over with detritus. Fall in, break a bone, shatter my torch, and over time my bones would join those of the dead sheep guarding the entrance.

Soon the tunnel levelled and the ceiling grew a little higher. The floor was comprised of damp, hard silt rather than leaves and loose soil, and I guessed the leaves would not have been blown in this deep.

I turned and crawled on head first. It would have been easy to lose track of time down there. I checked my watch and realised it was still ticking along recording my run, although it had lost satellite reception so the GPS would no longer be working. I paused it and switched it back to showing the time. 11:18. I’d been in the tunnel for maybe five minutes.

It felt longer.

I should turn around and go back, I thought. There’s nothing down here. It’s just an old drainage tunnel or something. Goes nowhere. I should go back.

But I didn’t go back, because that old curiosity drew me on. Though there was still a vague light behind me from the entrance, my main source of illumination was now the head torch, and I played it around as I continued to crawl. The walls were wet and slick with moss, the ceiling broken here and there where tree roots had grown through. I had to push some of them aside and they trailed cool fingers across my skin.

The tunnel seemed to be growing wider and deeper. I crawled on all fours, careful where I placed my hands, watching every move. Glancing left and right, I saw hollows in the vaulted walls that might once have led elsewhere, but each one was blocked from a cave-in, bricks and soil forming solid barriers.

This tunnel will cave in one day, I thought. I was moving deeper on trust, hoping that my being there didn’t cause a fault, a tumble, a roar of old frost-shattered bricks, soil and rock thumping down from above to trap me there forever. Jayne knew where I’d gone, but there was no phone or GPS reception this deep. If a search party did come looking and eventually found me, it would likely be way too late.

The danger was something like a thrill.

Next time I glanced at my watch, twenty minutes had passed. I paused at that, staring at the illuminated digital time blinking back at me. It hadn’t felt like more than a couple of minutes, but I couldn’t doubt what I saw. I’d reached a place in the tunnel where the walls were slick and wet, the floor increasingly boggy, and the roots protruding through the joints between bricks in the ceiling were pale and fine, hanging still like an upside-down forest. Some of them snapped as I brushed by, as if dead and petrified. Others caressed the back of my head and neck.

“Time to turn around,” I whispered. My words carried, and as I glanced ahead––imagining my voice winging its way deeper, into a darkness that might not have heard a human voice since this place was built––I saw the faint glow of daylight.

Excitement took me once again. The idea of seeing where this tunnel ended gripped me, and I felt like a true explorer. Maybe I’d emerge wet and muddied, and surprise someone looking into the far entrance and wondering where it went.

I scrambled onwards, and this lowest part of the tunnel was also the wettest. I slopped through mud, shaking my hands and spattering it up the walls. It was thick and black, and it smelled of forgotten places and age. I hurried on towards the glow, and soon the ground sloped up enough for me to see daylight.

Minutes later I approached the opposite end of the tunnel. I could see that it was somewhere still within the woods, and for a moment I was disappointed. I’d imagined emerging into an old tumbled building, or perhaps on to part of the barren hillside where I had never been. In truth, it was probably only a hundred feet from where I’d gone underground.

As the daylight grew stronger, so I anticipated its touch even more. I had no wish to go back into that gloom. There was nothing down there to concern me, but something about the darkness I was leaving behind started to repulse me, urging me onwards into the light.

Close to the entrance I saw the pale gleam of a skull.

I frowned. I was convinced that I’d crawled into the tunnel at one end and out the other. I moved closer, and as the sun touched my skin I realised that it was the same lamb’s skull.

Weird.

The sun felt good, dappling down through the tree canopy to speckle my arms and face. I stood and stretched, shaking mud from my hands, brushing it from my knees and bare legs, hearing the slosh of water in my backpack’s water bladder. I hadn’t taken a single drink while I’d been underground, and now thirst burnt in with a vengeance across my throat and tongue.

I sucked at the nozzle. The water was warm but welcome. I blinked and sighed, then looked up.

The sky past the trees was a blazing blue, scorched by sunlight. Wispy clouds streaked the heavens high above. Closer, the trees swayed in a gentle breeze, leaning back and forth as if whispering to one another about me. I looked up as they looked down.

I shivered. It was an unsettling thought.

Dropping back onto the path leading down through the woods to the road, I pushed through a spread of nettles. They kissed against my bare legs and fire tingled there, spiky, almost pleasant in its low burn. I didn’t recall the nettles being there a couple of hours before when I’d climbed towards the summit. Their leaves were speckled with some sort of fungus, making them hang heavy and low. I crouched down to look. Maybe being underground in the dark had made me so much more receptive to detail.

The fungus was pale grey in colour, each growth the thickness of a matchstick and just a few millimetres long, topped with a darker, globular speck. There were perhaps a hundred stems on each leaf, all of them curved and pointed in the same direction like miniature soldiers stood to attention. Although the nettles were still a rich, healthy green, I couldn’t help thinking that the fungal growths were parasitic.

Energised by my unexpected mini-adventure, I scanned the ground ahead as I started running downhill, dodging rocks, leaping down some of the steps that had been built into the path by local scouts a few years before. I always enjoyed running downhill, even though I was heading towards fifty and becoming more concerned about my knees. I needed to look after my joints if I was going to continue doing what I loved into my old age. But every time I thought that, I countered with, But this is looking after myself.

Something about my visit down into the tunnel niggled at me, like a whisper behind a door I couldn’t quite make out. It worried and scratched, and as I glanced around I felt unsettled in this, one of my favourite places, for the very first time.

The path followed a wide gulley carved into the mountainside over millennia by a stream. There were a few small waterfalls along its course, and now I noticed that the pool at the base of one was dammed with several fallen trees and debris accumulated against their trunks and branches. It formed an expanded lake where water gathered before slinking its way past or through the blockage. I briefly considered stripping off and taking a dip. The water looked cool and inviting.

It also looked dangerous.

I paused and frowned, catching my breath and trying to open the door on those niggles and whispers. Being below ground had unsettled me more than I’d believed, and I’d brought that feeling up with me, carrying it down towards the road, car park, and the car where a fresh change of clothes and a flask of coffee awaited.

I haven’t seen this pool before, I thought. I had no recollection of the falls being dammed like this, but then I always climbed the hill with my head down, checking the uneven path for trip hazards, pushing down on my knees so that I could achieve the best climb possible. My record so far was a little under half an hour. Maybe today I’d have broken it.

I glanced at my watch. It was still searching for a satellite signal.

Passing the pool I carried on, and it was only as I approached the bottom of the winding path that I acknowledged what was worrying me. The door opened and the truth roared in.

Everything was different. Only slightly, but there was a rough edge to things, like a sheen of wilderness smothering my surroundings.

The trees above me were heavier with leaves. A few had fallen, with several lying across the path and forcing me to squeeze underneath or climb over them. They had not been there before my ascent, and I could tell from one of their exposed root balls––the hole filled with a swathe of nettles, no bare soil showing, and the cracked timber pale from weathering—that it had not happened recently.

The path emerged onto a gravelled area beside the canal, the wide driveway and parking area attached to a low wooden house. There was a narrow tunnel leading beneath the canal and down to the car park beyond, but this side was a private residence, the public footpath running across the gravel to the tunnel. I’d seen the elderly owners of the house several times, and they always spared a wave or nod for those passing across their land to or from the steep path up the mountain.

The gravel was churned, and in places overgrown with weeds. The house looked abandoned, with smashed windows and paint flaking from its previously pristine woodwork. A Range Rover rested on flat tyres beside the house, its windows misted with a hazing layer of moss on the insides.

“What the hell?”

I stopped and looked around. Birds flitted from branch to branch, a few of them landing in the long grass of the canal’s towpath on the opposite bank. The towpath was overgrown. I could just make out a bike leaning against a wall. Plant tendrils had curled around its spokes and uprights.

“Hello?” I called. Some birds took flight at my shout, but they quickly landed again and started singing as if I wasn’t there. I frowned and shook my head. Maybe I was dehydrated. I took a drink and suddenly the taste of my water had changed, from warm but clean to stale and dirty, as if I was sucking up water from the canal.

This was all wrong. There was so much I hadn’t noticed on the way up the mountain, so much that I’d been certain of but which now was being proved less certain. When had the old couple moved out of their home and left it to decay? Why leave their vehicle behind?

I took a few steps towards the tunnel beneath the canal, and paused.

It had caved in. The steps down to it were piled with tumbled stones, and the tunnel itself was filled with dried mud and rocks, blocking it completely. If I hadn’t known it was there, it would not have been at all obvious.

“That’s just not right,” I said. “I came up through there two hours ago. Just a couple of hours.” I checked my watch. It was still searching for a satellite signal. Not right. “Hello?” I shouted louder, the sound of my voice the only thing pinning me to the world. Birds took flight again, but I didn’t seem to trouble them unduly. If I remained silent, if I did not interact with the world, I might as well not be there at all.

The canal bridge was fenced off, meant for exclusive use by the owners of the dilapidated house and enclosed within their garden and land. The tunnel was the public access, but now that it was blocked there was no other way across the canal. I skirted around the garden, pushing through waist-high undergrowth until I passed the garden area and stood close to the canal.

The water level was vastly reduced. That’s what’s happened, I thought. Maybe there’s been a breach and everything has changed. But a breach in the canal wouldn’t have changed so much in such a short time.

And this damage had been wrought a long, long time ago. There were still pools of water across the canal bed, but most of it had gone, perhaps flowing downhill from the fracture that had filled the tunnel. The pools remaining looked surprisingly clear, reflecting the blue sky and fluffy clouds as if presenting a memory of better times. Weeds grew across the rest of the canal’s uneven, dried-silt bed.

I climbed down, walked across, and scrambled out onto the towpath. It was deep with knee-high weeds.

It was impossible, yet the evidence was there before my eyes. Everything has changed.

I made my way to the steps that led down to where the tunnel emerged on the other side, at the top of the gentle slope that descended to the car park where I’d left my car. I needed to be there. I had to reach the comfortable Mazda, to see whether it was new and clean from the polish I’d given it last weekend, or old and rusting, wheels flat, windows grimy, metalwork fading from so long sitting unused and exposed to the harsh sunlight.

While I’d been down in the tunnel the world, and time, had moved on. All I could hear was the chatter of birds and the conspiratorial whispering of the trees as they observed my growing panic, laughing amongst themselves.

I climbed down the steps and saw that much of the landscape on this side of the canal had changed. The breach must have caused the cave-in, and tens of thousands of gallons of water had cascaded down the slope, carrying silt and rocks with it and washing away the gravelled road, hedges, and many tonnes of soil. The resulting slick had spread wide, and in the time since the breach had provided fertile ground for new plant growth. I ran through the low shrubs and long grasses, hearing creatures scurrying from my path, kicking my way from the canal and down what was left of the path to the car park. I heard no traffic. I smelled no fumes, and I realised just how clear and clean the air seemed, untainted by humankind.

I’m still underground, I thought. I fell and banged my head. I’m semi-conscious in that tunnel, and unless I wake and move I’ll be there until dusk, and then I might never find my way out.

The grasses felt cool and sharp against my bare legs. Seeds carried on the air tickled my face. Sweat ran down my back. Everything looked lush and rich, as if the plants were relishing this new-found freedom. And yet many plants were also home to that strange fungus I’d seen on the nettles back up the slope. It provided a haze across everything that seemed to knock my vision out of focus.

If I was still beneath the ground, my imagination was running riot.

I reached the road and ran straight across. The buildings to my right were familiar, but I barely glanced at them. I knew what I would see.

I knew because I could see my car. It might have been there forever.

I ran the three miles home. It was the strangest journey of my life, but running gave me the rhythm, pace and room to try and rationalise what was happening. It didn’t work, but just as concentrating on my breathing and footfalls helped occupy my mind, the attempt to make sense of what I was seeing, hearing and smelling diluted some of the terror that was settling over me.

I’d tried starting the car, of course, but the battery was flat. It was strange sticking the clean, shiny key into a vehicle so obviously degraded by time.

I was worried about Jayne. If everyone and everything had gone, then what about her? Where was she? On the other side of the tunnel, I thought, but I tried to silence that idea.

I lived three miles from the bottom of the hill. Usually I would have run that distance in a little under half an hour, but today I was faster. Everything I saw gave me energy, fear driving my legs and muscles.

Strange, faded red circles decorated the doors of at least half the homes, hints at something terrible. And although the town was empty of people, it was far from dead. By the Indian restaurant where we had celebrated our tenth anniversary I saw a small herd of deer, milling in the overgrown car park, wary as they watched me pass. A pack of half a dozen feral dogs stalked from an alley a few minutes later, and the hairs on the back of my neck bristled as they growled. I threw stones at them and they stalked away. Squirrels sat on rooftops and window ledges, rabbits frolicked across roads where weeds grew through cracked tarmac, and what might have been a big cat flowed through the shadows beneath a bridge. Nature had made this place of people its own now that the people were gone.

If I wasn’t so terrified, so confused and frightened, it might have been beautiful.

Just past an old car showroom, now displaying a score of vehicles resting on flat tyres and with rust eating at bodywork, I drew level with the local park. It had once contained a playing field, a bandstand and a play area for children, but now all that was gone. Close to the park gates and fence were three JCBs, motionless and dead. Beyond them, the park had been excavated in several long, wide strips. Some of these massive trenches were partly filled in, but most remained open to view. One was filled with rough timber coffins, piled in without any real care, like a tumble of giant Jenga blocks. The next trench along was filled with skeletons. They had run out of time to box up the dead.

I stopped and leaned against the cast-iron fence at the park’s boundary. I felt a deep, cool shock settling in me, a sickness of the soul as similar images from history sprung to mind. But these were no murder pits. Piled beside one trench were hundreds of simple wooden crosses, unplanted. I wondered if each of them bore a name, and my eyes were drawn back to the countless skeletons settled in the open excavation, staring at the sky with hollow eyes as they waited forever to be hidden away from this cruel, dead world.

I tore myself away from the dreadful sight and moved on. I saw no other mass burials, but the memory remained with me, an awful visual echo to everything else I witnessed.

When I reached my house there were no surprises to be found. It was the same as everywhere else. My home, the place where I lived and loved and felt safe, had fallen into ruin.

Seeing a place I knew so well in such a state was shattering, hitting home much harder than anything else I had seen. The house name Jayne and I had screwed to the front wall together was broken in two, half of it fallen away. She’d cut her thumb while we were fixing the plaque to the brickwork, and I’d put it in my mouth to ease her pain. The garish red paintwork she had chosen for the front door was faded, much of it peeled away to the bare wood beneath. The hawthorn tree we had planted in the front garden, and which had become so much work to keep under control, had grown wild, its spiked branches reaching forward for the street and back towards the house as if to embrace the place for itself. I remembered clipping those branches one by one, while Jayne snipped them small enough to feed carefully into the garden-waste bags. We’d both suffered pricks and wounds that day. She’d laughed at my pin-cushion hand that evening, and I’d rolled her onto the sofa and silenced her with a kiss.

I sobbed, standing in the street and staring at the place I had once called home.

I’d only left three hours earlier.

“Somebody!” I shouted. “Jayne! Anybody!” My cries echoed from buildings close by, but were soon swallowed by the wild trees and shrubs along our street. I reckoned that within another ten years much of this place would resemble an infant forest. Twenty years after that, new trees would be higher than the house roofs. And a century later, the houses would be little more than piles of rubble subsumed by undergrowth, hugged to the land’s embrace by brambly limbs.

I shouted again, the only reply my despairing and muffled cry echoing back at me. I took a step towards the house. It was desolate, silent and dead, and I dreaded what I might find inside. Nothing would be bad. The bones of my wife would be so much worse.

And then, as I pushed past the rotten front fence and the clasping plants that held it upright, movement. A shadow shifted in one of my home’s upper windows. Sunlight glinted from fractured glass. A pale face appeared at the window, still too far inside to make out properly, but definitely there.

Jayne, I thought, and took a step forward.

But it was not Jayne.

The face that appeared at the window was wild, heavy with beard and framed with long, straggly hair, thin and sunburned, eyes staring and mad. I felt a moment of rage at the man who had made my house his own.

Then I realised that this was the only person I had seen since leaving the tunnel, and my rage became confused. Tears came to my eyes, and I felt a pang of deep loneliness. I wanted to rush in and hug this man, speak to him, and hopefully understand that this strange situation was not merely my own personal madness. I wished it was.

“Hello!” I called. I took another step forward into the front garden, edging around the clasping thorns of the hawthorn. “What happened here? I went for a run and when I came back––”

He lifted an object and pointed it at me. I heard a low twang, and something sliced across my right bicep.

Shock rooted me to the spot as the man fumbled with the object and raised it again. I fell to the left just as another arrow whispered by, bouncing off the road behind me. Then I stood and ran.

Another arrow struck my bare left thigh, and I felt the piercing cool kiss of the tip slicing into my skin. I yelped and reached back, but the arrow had fallen away. Its head had merely cut my flesh, and when I brought my hand up it was smeared with blood. The pain was keen and sharp, the wound superficial. It didn’t seem to have affected my ability to move.

I did not stop running. I could not. I had to run as fast as I could, back across that strange town I had once known and over the drained canal, up the hillside, into the tunnel where everything had changed. There was no discernible thought process leading to this action, no consideration. It was the only thing to do, and it felt like the only way I might find my way back to normality.

From the house I had once lived in came a dreadful, guttural roar, a scream of such hopelessness that my blood ran cold and every hair on my body stood on end. I sprinted back the way I had come, fearing another arrow. The buildings around me now loomed, and every dark window or open doorway might have been the source of another deadly shot. But no more came, and it seemed that the person in my old house might have been the only one. I glanced back when I felt it safe, and for a second––just as I checked the ground ahead before twisting around to look behind me––I knew that he would be there with me, a ragged, wild shape so close behind that I could smell his breath, feel his body heat as he ran after me in complete, monstrous silence.

I was alone. I reached the bottom of the hill and retraced my steps, crossing the drained canal, climbing, arriving at last at the tunnel mouth beneath the steep bank. Panting hard, sweating, I hesitated only for a second before ducking inside. I glanced at the skull as I did so, suddenly certain that it would not be a sheep’s skull at all, but a human’s. Buried there at the tunnel entrance, it was one of the few things about my world that had not changed.

I moved much faster than I had the first time. The tunnel seemed smaller, the floor higher. My head torch lit the way and I ducked to avoid banging my skull on the low ceiling.

He’s behind me, I thought, crawling, hands clawed, so quiet that my own gasps and scramblings covered his sound. I looked back but I was alone.

Every shadow was danger. Only the small splash of light ahead offered any hope of freedom and salvation, but the sinking conviction came that I would emerge into that desolate landscape once again.

The first time I’d come in here I had somehow turned around, exiting the way I had entered even though I had continued through the tunnel towards daylight at the other end. I had no wish to do that again. Reaching into my backpack’s hip pocket I pulled out the small penknife I always carried with me. Jayne had given it to me for my eighteenth birthday, our first year together.

I opened the blade and crawled to the tunnel wall, ready to carve in a simple arrow to show me the direction I was taking. When I aimed my head torch at the old brickwork, at first I thought it was laced with a network of thin white strands, roots from one of the trees growing above. Then I saw the arrows.

There must have been fifty of them, maybe more, carved into the brickwork and all pointing in the same direction. A few of them were recent, their edges sharp and clear. Others appeared older, with moss dulling their clarity. Some were faded almost to nothing.

I stopped, gasping as I tried to catch my breath. Not my arrows, I thought, because they could not have been. I’d only been inside this tunnel once before and I hadn’t taken out my penknife.

I carved in a new arrow nonetheless, finding a bare spread of pitted brick and leaving my mark. I tried not to touch any of the others as I worked. Touching might link me to them, draw me in and make me part of the experience that had etched them there. All I wanted now was to find my way home.

It was like waking from a bad dream.

When I emerged from the tunnel at the same location where I’d entered––even though I knew I had not turned around down there––I could sense that everything had changed once again. Birds were singing a more familiar song. The light was softer and less threatening. Trees no longer whispered in the breeze. The skull close to the tunnel entrance was more exposed, and when I ran downhill and approached the canal, the old man who lived in the house there gave me a gruff nod.

I drove home faster than I should have, to find a jug of coffee on the warmer and Jayne in the shower. I stripped and got into the shower with her, and she reached for me as I started to cry, shivering uncontrollably even though she turned up the heat and hugged me to her, confused at my reaction and almost crying herself. I welcomed her touch and smell. I never wanted to let go.

By the time we went to one of our favourite riverside pubs for lunch, the things I had seen and experienced were starting to feel like a dream. The memories were woolly, although they did not fade. I drove so that Jayne could drink, but the real reason was that I did not want to muddy my thoughts and allow back in the fears and confusion.

Later, with Jayne snoring softly in bed beside me, moonlight passed through the curtains and cast uneasy patterns across the ceiling, shapes in which I perceived uncertain truths. But they were only shapes in my imagination, it was only moonlight, and I eased into a comfortable sleep listening to my wife’s breathing and feeling the weight of night as a comfort rather than a threat.

Upon waking, the previous day’s events had faded even more into that place where bad dreams inevitably dissolve.

Two days later I started climbing the hill to fill in the tunnel. Jayne knew that something had changed within me on that early morning run, and she did her best to draw it out and help me move on. But she also acknowledged my need to return on my own. The first time, I sat twenty feet from the tunnel and just stared, tempting the darkness to reveal to me what had happened. Something in there, I thought, and I imagined old discarded canisters of degraded gas, natural fumes from an unknown cavern system, tainted water dripping from the tunnel ceiling and entering my mouth. Something had taken me and edged me towards a terrifying madness, holding me over the edge of a deep and awful ravine. Only my determination had prevented me from falling.

That first day I kicked the sheep’s skull into the tunnel and piled a few rocks into the entrance, sweating and panting with the effort. When a family climbing up for a walk on the mountain gave me a strange look, I paused in my efforts and smiled at them. I offered no explanation. There was none that made any sense.

From then on I returned in the early mornings, telling Jayne I was going for a run up and around my familiar route. I halted every time at the tunnel, and after five days I’d piled in enough scattered rocks and fallen bricks to clog the entrance. On day six I used a heavy block to loosen more bricks, encouraging heavy falls of damp dirt from the banking above the tunnel, pushing it into hollows to bind and seal, testing the new barrier by standing and jumping on it.

Still it was not enough. At night the bad dreams lurked, and sometimes they came fully fledged, pursuing me like that mad, raving shape from my own ruined house as I thrashed and groaned myself awake and submitted to Jayne’s concerned hugs. She suggested I see someone. I agreed. I never kept the appointments, instead climbing the slope with bags of sand and cement in my rucksack. When there were enough I mixed the concrete, and probed it deep between rocks and bricks, filling hollows and smearing it across the filled-in tunnel entrance until I could see no holes at all leading inside.

Once dried, I covered the rough structure with mud and leaves and fallen branches. I planted several fast-growing shrubs around the area. By the time winter came, all evidence of the tunnel entrance was gone. Some people might have remembered it being there, but soon they would forget.

Sometimes I had nightmares about being buried alive, following a thousand arrows to an entrance that no longer existed. Often I believed that my waking life was the dream, and the tunnel was my dark, damp reality.

Jayne became tired of my nightmares. She found out that I had never gone to any appointments with the doctor or therapist. She left, accusing me of not doing anything to help myself.

In truth, I’d done everything I possibly could.

I’ve become one of those people. You know the type. People talk about me behind my back, sometimes in pity, more often with humour. Part of me wishes it was all back to the way it was before, but another part of me knows that I’m doing the right thing. This isn’t madness. I left madness down there in the tunnel, scratched on the wall and shut away with tons of stones and bricks, soil and cement. This is the exact opposite of madness. This is clarity. This is being prepared.

People have started to die. I’d been expecting it, and I’ve always been certain of who would go first––the closest person to me, though that closeness has changed. At least Jayne welcomed me to her bedside as she was ailing, and when I told her I loved her she smiled and said she loved me too. That means an awful lot and such knowledge will, I hope, give me courage in the times to come.

Times of plague and death, confusion and chaos. Times of silence. Times of decay.

I still go running every day, sometimes covering upwards of twenty miles. I pass by the hidden tunnel mouth occasionally, but I have no worries about anyone emerging from there. It’s solidly plugged. Besides, there are countless other places. Manholes and culverts, drains and caverns, riverbank hollows and old, forgotten tunnels under churches and castles, car parks and hotels.

I’m collecting as many weapons as I can find. I target houses where people have died, and it’s easy because the authorities have started painting these places with red circles. So far I have seven bows, three crossbows and two shotguns. Hardly a stockpile, but it will only be one man, and it will only take one shot.

I brought something back with me through that tunnel. A disease that is making this world its own, and which does not touch me. Thinking about why that is will send me mad, because I’ve heard no evidence of anyone else being immune. I’m cursed with a terrible purpose. I saw evidence of the contagion on the plants over there, the strange fungal-like growths, and perhaps I should have thought more of it when I found the empty town, the dilapidation, the mass graves. But I’m not in the business of regret.

Today, the traumatised authorities started digging a huge trench in the local park.

One day soon, when the world is dead and I’m one of the last left alive––perhaps the only one left––he will emerge from somewhere else and come to pay me a visit. He’ll know where to come because home is an important place. It’s somewhere you’re meant to feel safe. Once here, there’s no way I can let him return and take the infection back to where he came from. It’s a heavy responsibility, but one which I know I was destined to shoulder.

I have no idea what shooting myself will feel like.

This time I will not miss.