The Adrift Trilogy: The Black River

by K. R. Griffiths

  He reached the tractor and yanked open the door, and had hauled himself into the seat with a grunt before his mind processed the image his eyes had seen properly, the odd detail that had lurked in his peripheral vision as he ran from the house.

  He froze, his hand still on the open door, his arm getting soaked, but all of a sudden, he didn’t notice the rain at all.

  What the hell was that?

  Just for a moment there, during that monochrome snapshot taken by the storm, he could have sworn he saw something moving beyond the main barn a few hundred feet ahead of him. Something big. He might have dismissed it as an animal, maybe even one of his own, but for the fact that in that brief instant, Barry was certain that whatever he had seen was walking upright.

  Like a man.

  Righteous anger sparked deep in his gut. It wasn’t just the rain and the silage that had ruined his year; it was the sickness in the animals: a relentless tide of poor health that no vet seemed able to stem nor adequately explain, and which slowly ate away at the cows and sheep. Way more deaths among the sheep, particularly, than at any other time that Barry could recall. And all in the same year that he received several offers for his land from the wealthy bastards who owned the land adjacent to his own.

  Strange folks, the Rennicks, no doubt about that. When a sheep had once broken through the fence and ended up on Rennick land, Barry caught a glimpse of the house, which seemed almost deliberately hidden by trees, and could have sworn he saw people dressed in robes, like monks. Local rumour had it that the Rennicks ran some sort of commune out there in the woods. When the locals had taken a few drinks, those rumours darkened: the Rennick family was involved in strange rituals, they said. Occult practices, they said. Satanism.

  There were a lot of them, Barry was sure of that. Maybe they wanted his land to expand their…whatever the hell it was.

  Too bad for them.

  The Reid family farm had been handed down through the generations, and it didn’t matter if the Rennicks added a couple of zeroes to their offer. What mattered was that Barry’s father had charged him with maintaining the farm and passing it on to his own son someday, and there was no way he could sell it. It simply was not possible. When an agent representing the Rennicks turned up at Barry’s doorstep with an offer, he told them exactly that.

  And then the animals started to get sick.

  Barry was no fool; it was impossible for him not to put that particular two-plus-two together, but he had never had any concrete evidence.

  So far.

  Someone had been poisoning his livestock for months, Barry was sure of it, slowly tightening the financial noose around his neck. And now he had seen the bastard, right there on his property; had caught him red handed as he skulked around in the pre-dawn.

  Barry squinted into the darkness, searching for movement and seeing none, and thought about the old shotgun he kept back at the farmhouse, and which he had never found a use for beyond firing a blast in the general direction of foxes.

  Bad idea, Barry. You might just get angry enough to fire that weapon.

  He felt adrenaline coursing through him like rocket fuel, and gritted his teeth.

  Besides, you don’t need no gun for this.

  He climbed down from the tractor cab with a grunt, balling up his fists, and headed purposefully toward the distant barn. By the time he reached it, Barry was almost sprinting, working himself up into a thrumming mess of fury. He burst into the dark building, drawing in a breath to holler a wordless roar of attack as he charged at the intruder like some marauding Viking, and stopped abruptly, surprised.

  It looked empty.

  Barry frowned, and unclenched his fists. Flicking on the overhead fluorescents, he bathed the barn in a cold, white light, and blinked as his eyes adjusted and the shadows evaporated.

  Nothing.

  The barn looked empty, because it was empty. Of people, at any rate. Yet there was one significant addition to the old building’s interior, and Barry’s eyes fell upon it immediately.

  Right in the centre of the barn, somebody had dug a large hole. A good three feet in diameter, at least.

  What the hell?

  Barry stepped forward slowly, and his jaw slackened. Even from several yards away, it was impossible to miss the truth: the hole hadn’t been dug at all. Tell-tale furrows were cut into the dirt floor, as if the hole had been created by fingers or paws, not by a shovel. It looked more like something had tunnelled its way out of the earth.

  Like a mole the size of a damn horse, Barry thought, and let out a nervous snort.

  He fished his keys from his pocket. His keyring held a penlight, and he flicked it on and leaned into the hole slowly, half-afraid that something would leap out at him. He held his breath as the light played over a passage that appeared endless, swallowed entirely by the blackness beyond the feeble illumination provided by the tiny bulb.

  For several long seconds, Barry’s mind played devious tricks on him, and he felt a crawling certainty that something was lurking there, just beyond the cone of light, watching him hungrily; something that would at any moment streak toward him on all fours, snarling and—

  There was nothing.

  No movement in the strange tunnel beyond the shivering shadows cast by the light Barry held in fingers which had begun to tremble, as if they possessed some knowledge of the situation that his slow-moving mind did not.

  Barry grimaced, and told his raging nerves sternly to calm the hell down.

  Whatever the tunnel had been created by, it was clearly empty now.

  Because it’s already out there, you idiot. It tunnelled out of the ground, and now it’s out there in the darkness, watching you; getting closer…

  Barry’s brow knitted as his thoughts began to race forward, taking on a lurching life of their own.

  It?

  That was a troubling development: Barry was not a man given to flights of fancy. When his mind suddenly conjured up images of bizarre creatures rising from the ground like zombies; like some bad horror movie had been made real in the ground beneath his property, he felt a nervous laugh building. The notion was ridiculous, of course.

  Yet he had caught a glimpse of something out there in the rain, just for a moment. Something that walked upright, like a man.

  He suddenly felt terribly exposed in the middle of the barn, and he spun to face the open door, tensing his muscles in readiness, certain that whatever he had seen out there would be charging toward him; some horror that had crawled out of the earth…

  Beyond the gaping barn door, all he saw was darkness and rain.

  He stepped outside warily, leaving the lights in the barn blazing, and swept his penlight in a wide arc. The farm buildings looked still, but the light wasn’t powerful enough to be certain. Barry forced himself to focus, concentrating on listening, trying to sift through the ceaseless sound of the rain falling and the incessant whine of the wind. For a moment, he thought he heard footsteps coming toward him, and he sighed in relief when he realised it was the sound of his own pulse, hammering in his ears.

  In the distant darkness, he heard a faint thud.

  The front door?

  Did I lock it?

  Barry’s muscles called a time out, and he stood there for several moments, frozen. He tried to tell himself that he was alone; just him and the rain. His tired mind was playing tricks on him, that was all. It was nothing.

  But it wasn’t nothing. Barry knew that on a fundamental level, like some long-forgotten animal instinct had suddenly awoken and screamed for his attention. The darkness felt wrong. Dangerous.

  He took a couple of steps toward the distant farmhouse, set on fetching the shotgun and a powerful flashlight, and his breath caught in his throat.

  He heard it.

  Above the rain.

  A sound that Barry abruptly realised had been ongoing for several seconds before he became conscious of it. A noise that twisted around the howl of the wind, as though trying to conceal itself.

/>   Screaming.

  At the house.

  Sara normally woke an hour after him, the kids around seven, depending on how hungry they were. But someone was awake early, and they were screaming; pouring everything they had into bellowing out a noise that made Barry’s soul wither.

  He ran for the house without thinking, sprinting blindly through the storm, careering across a nightmare that made his mind and muscles feel oddly sluggish. Another scream cleaved the dark morning air, worse even than the first.

  A different voice, Barry’s mind tried to think, scrabbling for clarity. A male voice. My boy...

  With each passing yard, his sense of dislocation from reality increased.

  Time stretching taut; threatening to snap.

  It took him mere seconds to return to the farmhouse; each one felt like a lifetime. When he burst through the front door, the screaming became a deafening symphony that drowned out the storm outside. The noise echoed off the walls, making the air itself vibrate. It sounded like the screaming was coming from everywhere all at once, but for Barry, there was no mistaking the source of the awful noise.

  Upstairs.

  The bedrooms.

  Acting on autopilot, he yanked open the cupboard next to the front door, and pulled out his shotgun: an old, double-barrelled affair that would persuade any intruders that they needed to rethink their life choices. He took the stairs three at a time, inserting shells as he went, his thoughts a shapeless roar. When he reached the top of the stairs, he had a direct line of sight to the bedroom his two youngest daughters shared.

  He stopped.

  Tried to process it.

  Couldn’t.

  Sara was in the bedroom with the twins. He recognised the shape of his wife immediately, even in the dark; the lines his eyes had traced lovingly for more than twenty years.

  And he recognised another shape: one that was spread across the floor in ruins. Barry’s teenage son. Josh had been ripped apart like wet paper; human form reduced to a slick pile of steaming meat.

  Sara didn’t seem to see Barry; she cowered back toward a wall, attempting to position her body as a shield in front of her young twin daughters. Trying to protect them from...

  ...from...

  Barry had no word for it.

  The creature in the room with his family was tall and impossible, a sneering, seething mass of teeth and claws. Something that Barry’s mind tried to assimilate and couldn’t. As he watched in stunned horror, paralysed by the sight of the thing, the creature drove its right arm forward, plunging it into Sara’s chest with a sickeningly moist snap.

  When it withdrew its hand from her ribcage, it clutched Sara’s heart.

  Popped the glistening muscle into its hideous mouth like a piece of candy.

  And Barry was screaming along with his daughters.

  Lifting the shotgun.

  Aiming it at the hateful demon that had crawled from the earth to take his family.

  Squeezing the trigger, and—

  It looked right at him.

  Right into him.

  Eyes like claws.

  Reaching into his thoughts, sinking into the surface of his mind like meathooks.

  Twisting and tearing.

  The shotgun blast that was supposed to tear the abomination in two never came, as if somehow the finger that cradled the trigger no longer belonged to Barry at all.

  Somewhere, buried deep in the basement of Barry’s mind, there existed a part of him that clung to sanity, but it finally began to collapse when his arms moved of their own volition, aiming the shotgun at his young daughters as they huddled together in abject terror.

  Screaming.

  Staring at him with fear and confusion that made his soul whimper.

  No—

  The creature allowed Barry to imbibe the last of his family’s fear for a dreadful, eternal moment, before the finger that was no longer his squeezed the trigger at last.

  And he saw it all through eyes that he was powerless to shut.

  A liquid explosion.

  Painting the wall.

  Chunks of grey flesh impacting against stone with a barely audible thud as the echoing blast of the shotgun faded.

  Small, precious bodies falling together; a twisted, unrecognisable mass of shredded flesh.

  And the creature chuckled. A mirthless, rasping noise like metal grinding on metal. The soundtrack to a maniac’s fevered nightmares.

  The abyss of insanity finally swallowed Barry whole.

  He dropped the gun.

  Fell to his knees in the blood.

  And the entire world was teeth.

  5

  Darkness.

  Pain.

  He broke the surface.

  Gulped down a lungful of air that scorched like napalm.

  Screamed.

  And the black river pulled him back under, thrashing him in its jaws like a predator. Shaking his senses apart; breaking and remaking him over and over.

  Carrying him toward something terrible.

  And below the boiling black surface, down in the stinking undercurrent where light barely existed, he realised with horror that he was not alone.

  There are hands down there; oh dear Christ, arms in the darkness. Reaching for me.

  Grasping.

  Pulling me down and—

  6

  Dan awoke with a scream that emptied out of his throat like acid, and for a moment his vision swam dangerously, as if the noxious sleep was trying to take him back, like it was outraged that he had escaped its clutches, its

  —hands in the darkness—

  He shuddered at the blank space filling his mind. He was unable to recall anything beyond fear and shadows that seemed to cling to him, draped across him like a veil. Even his own name escaped him for several aching seconds.

  When his vision cleared, he found that he was lying on his back, staring up at a ceiling of featureless metal, and all around him there was a roaring thunder. The entire world seemed to be lurching, rocking crazily, and for a moment Dan was back in the nightmare which had felt endless; back in the raging torrent. No longer sure whether he was awake or dreaming.

  He sat upright, squeezing his eyes shut and gasping for air as the corrosive memories returned to him.

  “Thank fuck for that,” a voice said.

  Dan flinched. He wasn’t alone in the large, gloomy room. He didn’t recognise the man’s face, but he knew the voice perfectly well. He had heard it plenty.

  “You’ve been screaming for the past ten minutes. Figured maybe that meant you were coming round. Or dying.”

  Herb leaned casually against the wall to Dan’s right, his arms folded across his chest. He grinned broadly as Dan met his gaze.

  “It’s Herb, from the container. You remember the container?”

  Dan began to nod, and it felt like something in his skull was loose, rolling around queasily, driving a spear of pain into the back of his head. He pressed his palms to his temples, breathing deeply and evenly, and waited for it to pass.

  As he had guessed in the pitch black container, Herb was young—he would have said the guy was early-twenties, no more—and a good few inches taller than Dan himself. He was stocky, with a severe haircut that made him look like he’d just joined the military. Overall, it was a look that Dan thought he should have found intrinsically threatening, but Herb’s easy grin belied his forbidding appearance.

  “Yeah, I remember. How long have I been unconscious?”

  “About eight hours, give or take. It’ll be midday soon. Thought you were never gonna speak again,” Herb said.

  Dan swallowed. His throat felt dry and raw.

  “I killed a man.”

  It wasn’t an appropriate response—far from it—but it was what Dan’s mind threw up. He had killed a man, right before the seizure had swept him away. And not just killed him; he had executed him on his knees.

  The world tilted suddenly, lurching like a drunk, and his gut cramped. If he’d had anything lef
t in his belly after a night spent witnessing horrors that would have turned even the strongest of stomachs, he was sure he would have puked.

  The psychotic break he had always feared had finally happened. A dark corner of his mind had been reserved for the certainty that he would someday wake to find that he had done something terrible while in the grip of his illness, and here it was at last. A fragmented image of the event surfaced in his thoughts; the memory of the body of Charles Rennick twitching like a marionette as he poured bullets into it.

  His therapist had warned him that he might not be ready for something as tense as a cruise. She hadn’t known the half of it.

  I’m a murderer.

  The world bucked beneath him once more, and this time he did retch, and a thin string of painfully acidic bile trickled from his lips.

  For a moment, all he could do was cough and gasp for air as Herb stared at him quizzically.

  When the nausea passed, Dan wiped at his mouth with his wrist and scanned the room properly. It looked like he had been placed in a large steel box; he could almost have believed it was another—even larger—shipping container, but for the light spilling through a single narrow window near the ceiling.

  “Where am I?”

  “We’re still on the trawler.” Herb’s brow furrowed in apparent concern. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Dan spat and shook his head, and suddenly, incredibly, a bitter laugh spilled from his mouth. It was the exact question he had always feared, the very reason that he had spent two years locked in his London apartment. The overwhelming certainty that strangers would be able to see straight through him, right to his broken core. To the wrongness. Once, being confronted by that question would have filled him with a paralysing anxiety—maybe even severe enough to induce a full-blown panic attack.

  “I’m not normal,” Dan said through gritted teeth, biting down on the hysteria that wanted to burst from him. “That’s what’s wrong with me. What the fuck’s wrong with you? Daddy issues?”

  Herb’s expression hardened, and Dan’s eyes widened in shock.