The Returned
Authors: Seth Patrick
Tags: #Fiction, #Media Tie-In, #General, #Literary Criticism, #Horror
1
The girl paused on her way across the top of the dam and looked out over the town far below.
The sun was setting, she noted, dipping behind the mountains; lights blazed in the distant windows of the town, car headlights weaving through its streets. How was it so late? The last thing she
could recall was sitting in a coach heading out on a school trip, bright morning sun outside as she watched the pines fly past her window. She’d been listening to music, trying to drown out
the lecturing voice of her teacher.
How many hours ago had that been? And how had she got here, now? She tried to remember, tried to bring it back. All that came was a sense of panic. Panic, then darkness. And then nothing.
Something had happened.
She continued walking hurriedly over the dam, the temperature falling as night came. She should have felt cold, she knew. Her cardigan was thin – she’d been dressed for the heat of a
midsummer’s day, not the bitter chill of night air. But somehow she didn’t feel cold, not even slightly. Instead, she felt scared. And she felt
hungry
.
She picked up her pace, her breathing tight and fast. She thought of her parents. Her mother would be out of her mind with worry, her father angry. She thought of her sister. And she thought of
Frédéric.
They’d be waiting for her. They’d help her find out what had happened, help her fill in those missing hours. She felt such a longing then – so fierce in her chest that it stole
her breath away.
Home
, she thought.
It was time to go home.
Anton Chabou stood on the dam and watched the still water. The first time he’d seen the lake, eleven months before, low cloud had flowed slowly down the valley to cover
the water’s surface. It had rolled onward, over the top of the dam like the ghost of a waterfall, heading for the town below.
Now, an hour after the sun had gone down, the air was clear. The lake’s surface was like black glass. Behind him, occasional cars drove by. The dam acted as a bridge for all but the
heaviest vehicles, the fastest route out of town for those heading north and prepared to make the climb up the steep valley-side roads. He’d even seen a young woman crossing on foot earlier,
shortly before he’d left the control room. It was a rare sight. Most people who wanted to savour the view came by car.
His phone was in his hand. He didn’t want to make the call, but he knew it had to be done, even if he was the new guy. Eric, his partner for the shift, had been in the job for ten years,
and Eric had shaken his head, muttering, wanting nothing to do with it.
‘Wait until the shift change,’ Eric had said. ‘Act like we just noticed it, and let
them
make the call.’ Then Eric had sat in the control room, storm-faced,
refusing to discuss it further.
Anton had already made the preliminary checks required of him, before raising it with Eric. A remote visual examination of the abutments showed no sign of seepage, and the flow measurements
seemed correct. Getting a better idea of the current water intake would be necessary, but even if every source of water into the reservoir had done the impossible and conspired to stop, they simply
weren’t taking enough water out to result in the fall he’d seen since coming to work that morning.
The lake was emptying, and he had no idea how.
As the senior engineer on the shift, Eric’s advice to wait almost amounted to a command, but it was advice Anton knew he would have to ignore. He had spent the next hour satisfying himself
that nothing obvious was wrong. That meant taking the central maintenance shaft down to the upper and lower inspection galleries.
‘Gallery’, he’d always thought, was an odd word for what was really just a cramped grey circular tunnel running through the structure of the dam, sickly lighting strung along
one side, and barely enough room to stand. He had to keep his head down to avoid constantly scraping his hard hat on the cold concrete above.
By the time he’d walked the upper gallery, his neck was aching and his mood was sour. But he’d bitten his lip and gone down, down, to the lower gallery. In theory, the lower was
indistinguishable from the upper. The same restricted space, the same weak lighting. The same cold grey. But every time he went down there, it made him claustrophobic in a way the upper gallery
never did. He was vividly conscious of the weight of water above him, somehow; reaching the end of the tunnel and turning back again, he always had the same image flash in his mind of dark water
rushing towards him, icy and vengeful.
His impromptu inspection revealed no problems. The next stage would be to log the measurements on each of the ninety expansion strips throughout the galleries and compare them with the last
recorded values, normally a weekly chore that took up most of the shift of whoever drew the short straw. He would go down again and make a start on it, once he’d had a break from the
confinement and a little fresh air.
Once he’d made the call.
And so he was back at the top of the dam, phone in hand. He hunted for the number he’d been given almost a year before, when he’d first taken the job. The breeze picked up, suddenly
bitter, but he preferred the dry sharpness to the damp chill of the tunnels below, a chill that got deep into your bones and was hard to get rid of.
He dialled.
‘Yes?’ said a man’s voice.
‘This is Anton Chabou, sir. The water level is dropping. We can’t account for it.’
For a moment, the voice stayed silent. Then: ‘You’re sure?’
Anton was about to give a typical engineer’s response: explain the possibilities that remained, explain the procedures they would follow to fully assess the integrity of the dam. But the
voice knew all of that; all he wanted from Anton was a single word. Yes or no.
‘Yes,’ Anton said.
‘I’ll be there within two hours.’
‘There’s a chance it could just be . . .’ Anton started, but the man had already hung up.
Anton put his phone in his pocket, readying himself to go back down to the galleries and begin taking measurements. Feeling cold, he stamped his feet and moved around, trying to rid himself of
the chill in his bones. It made little difference.
He stared out across the lake and thought about what lay underneath. He thought about what he’d been told officially when he took the job, and about what he’d heard in the months
since – rumours, inconsistent, conflicting. He thought about what he
believed
.
Shivering, he started to descend.
Jérôme Séguret sat in his car outside the Lake Pub and wondered what the hell he’d done to deserve it all.
Disappointed and confused, he’d just left Lucy Clarsen in the room above the pub.
‘Sorry,’ she’d said. ‘It can’t work every time.’
He’d given her the usual money, even though things hadn’t gone to plan. When he asked if he could see her again next week she shrugged and said something non-committal, completely at
ease with a situation that he found painfully awkward. He avoided eye contact and wondered how he could kid himself that there was anything good about their sessions. On his way out to the car, he
saw his daughter Léna by the bar with her friends. He was too slow; she spotted him, and spotted who he’d been with. The look in her eye was a blend of irritation and disgust.
He’d slunk outside to his car, angry with himself.
He flipped down the sun visor, slid back the cover of the mirror, and glared. It wasn’t that long ago, he thought, since everything had felt right, had felt
normal
. The family
finances had been solid, he’d had a wife he adored and two daughters who made him proud, even as they were entering the hard teens. He’d had a smile, back then.
Now the haunted eyes staring at him in the mirror were those of a different man. He was forty-four, by rights. Four years ago, he’d felt younger than his age, and had looked it. Now? Hell,
he could be taken as a decade older, maybe more. His hairline was decimated, his skin mottled, and his eyes . . .
‘Christ,’ he muttered, and flipped the visor back up. He couldn’t meet anyone’s gaze any more. Especially not his own. Shame and guilt, in equal parts. That was all his
eyes held now. Hope, like his smile, was long gone. Extinguished on the day they’d lost Camille.
His daughter had died in a coach accident that ended the lives of the driver, one teacher, and thirty-eight children from the town’s largest school, all in the same year group. There had
been two children booked on the biology field trip who had happened to miss it. One, David Follin, had shattered his ankle two days before while trying to take on the town’s highest set of
steps with his skateboard, his best friend Martin filming it on his phone. Martin had put the footage on YouTube the night before he himself had died in the crash.
The other child to miss the trip had been Léna, Camille’s twin sister. She’d claimed illness that morning; Jérôme’s wife, Claire, had suspected Léna
was feigning it but had given her the benefit of the doubt. He still didn’t know the truth of it, and it wasn’t a topic he ever wanted to raise. It had been Claire who had attended the
counselling sessions with Léna; Claire who had held the girl for the long nights that followed Camille’s death. Jérôme had seen the distance growing between him and his
daughter, and between him and his wife, but consumed by his own grief he’d felt powerless to do anything about it.
He and David Follin’s father, Vincent, had been friends before the accident, and found themselves becoming drinking partners in the aftermath.
‘David can’t cope with it,’ Vincent had said. ‘Whenever he sees a parent, a friend, a sibling of one of those who died, he believes they’re thinking: “Why
you? Why did you live?” He wants to get away from it. The boy can’t even breathe without feeling guilty.’ Within a year David and his family had moved back to Vincent’s home
town of Cholet.
Jérôme had missed the company on those nights when he couldn’t bear being sober. For over two years following the accident, that had been most nights.
Now, he drank less, and in his own living room. It was cheaper, and he preferred the solitude: he lived in a shitty apartment in town, not in the house on the outskirts where Claire and
Léna still lived. He needed to be careful with money, and not just because of the rent he was paying; he’d been seeing Lucy Clarsen more often than he could really afford.
Everything had been right in his life, four years before. Then a coach had veered off a mountain road and taken his life down with it.
It was a ten-minute drive to the Helping Hand, a shelter co-funded by the church and the town hall. Jérôme had managed to bury his frustration a little by the time
he got there for the regular parents’ support meeting.
The parents. Well, those who were left.
He’d added it up one night. He’d actually gone to the trouble of enumerating the grief.
Thirty-eight children, thirty-eight families: seventy-six parents, and twenty-nine siblings. The coach driver had a wife, and two sons in their early twenties. The teacher was married but
childless.
One hundred and nine immediate relatives, and he’d stopped counting. So much for arithmetic.
Like David Follin’s family, many had moved away. Too many memories. Of those parents who had stayed, most had other children still at the school and had decided against dragging a grieving
child away from their friends, from all that was familiar and comforting to them.