For The Night Is Dark

by Mynhardt, Joe

  Barlow would have preferred to have stuck with the booze and the Playstation but he knew Mark and Griff were hardcore; there was nothing they wouldn’t try if they thought they could get off on it. Magic mushrooms were just another source of stimulant. Jake looked nervous though.

  “So—what?” Griff asked. “We just break in to the flat?”

  “We don’t need to break-in when we’ve got this.” Mark produced a key with a triumphant flourish. “Ta-dah!”

  They trudged up the subway steps at the other side, doing their best to shelter from the onslaught of rain. Taxis glided along the dual carriageway trailing spray in their wake. There was a pub on the corner, The Black Dog, and its brightly-lit windows nearly crumbled Barlow’s resolve. As they drew close, techno music pulsed through the walls onto the street.

  Mark led them squelching across the kids’ playground. The rain was relentless. Sodden takeaway cartons did their best to conceal dog turds in the lengthy grass. The graffiti-scarred climbing-frame waited in the darkness like an ancient monolith.

  There was a row of terraced townhouses on the other side of the square, and Mark pointed to the one furthest left. “Lower ground floor.” They approached and stared up at the four-storey building that towered over the street. Each flat bore identical doors and window-frames; there was nothing to differentiate the one in darkness from the others in the block. Yet Barlow stared down through the iron railings at the cold featureless façade of the flat and felt a powerful sense of unease. Maybe it was his knowledge of what had occurred in there. Or perhaps it was just the storm.

  “C’mon.” Mark disappeared down the iron steps to the door at the bottom. He fumbled around for a moment before unlocking it and slipping inside. Griff hurried down after him. Presently the light went on in the flat, even though the window-blinds prevented them from seeing into the room.

  Jake glanced at Barlow hesitantly. “You coming?”

  Barlow sniffed, nonchalance personified. “Think I might have a smoke first.”

  Jake nodded and sloped off down the steps.

  The patter of rain on Barlow’s hood was deafening. He shivered and glanced both ways along the deserted street. Nothing but shadows and water and the faintly depressing signs of urban decay.

  For a few minutes he smoked a cigarette, enjoying the sense of solitude, as the row of terraced flats seemed to regard him indifferently. He pondered what went on behind those closed doors. Countless windows stared back, reminding him of the faceted eyes of an insect. Again he shivered. He finished the cigarette, dropped it with a flare of sparks and crushed it underfoot. He hurried down the steps to the flat.

  It was only once he was inside the door and breathing in the smell of bleach that he realised he’d been unconsciously expecting it to reek of something nasty. Instead, the detergent was almost overpowering. The floor appeared anaemic; like it had—until recently—been carpeted. Now the exposed tiles looked conspicuously clean, too shiny. All the furniture had been stacked together at one side, presumably awaiting removal by the next-of-kin. The tarnished gas fire looked in need of replacing. Mark was standing in the corner of the room, demonstrating where the tenant had been found: the grouting between the floor tiles was stained with something dark and sticky. Griff and Jake listened with fascinated intensity. The flat was stone cold.

  “And here’s the hatch.” Mark indicated a door cut into the plasterboard of the wall, about two feet square. It was crudely done. It looked like someone—presumably the previous tenant—had installed it himself. “There’s a room through there. All bare and wild and shit. Soil on the ground. The mushrooms grow in it.”

  Griff bent down and opened the hatch. It was too dark to see much, but Barlow detected a sour stench emanating from it, brackish and organic. He wrinkled his nose and took a step backward. Griff activated the torch function on his mobile phone and held it up at an angle so he could peer through the hatch into the darkness. “Fuck me!”

  “What is it?” Jake’s voice was shrill. He swallowed and licked his lips again.

  Griff ignored him and crouched on his hands and knees. He squeezed his upper body through the hatch until just the lower half remained visible. He said something but it was muffled.

  “What?” Mark bent down beside him.

  Griff withdrew from the hatch. “It’s fucking huge in there! How can it be so big?”

  Mark shrugged. “I don’t know. We reckoned it must extend under the park a bit. Can you see the shrooms?”

  “Not really. There’s just soil near this front bit.”

  “You need to go further in,” said Mark. “I think Bazza picked most of the ones from the front.”

  Griff disappeared into the hatch again, this time so just his feet stuck out. Mark shuffled close to the hatch and peered in. “Pass them here.” Griff’s hand appeared, bearing two small pale objects which Mark took. Griff emerged from the hatch again. His face was flushed. “There’s tons of them. And some weird roots sticking up through the earth.”

  “Come on, pick some more,” said Mark. “We’ll fry them back at the flat.”

  Barlow felt detached from the others. Bored. He drifted out of the room, through the hallway into the galley-kitchen at the rear. It was freezing. He clicked on the light. The worktops were bare; most of the utensils had been packed into cardboard boxes, awaiting disposal. A smell of disinfectant had erased the evidence of a life once lived here. It was clinical. He peered through the kitchen door into the sunken yard at the rear, but darkness had swallowed its detail. He turned back. He clicked off the light and wandered out of the kitchen.

  The hallway looked depressingly bare. Barlow could hear the excited chatter from the front room. He pushed open the bedroom door and clicked on the light.

  More signs of the recently-departed tenant: a discoloured sagging mattress on the bed, several towering stacks of tatty paperbacks, cardboard boxes stuffed with CDs and DVDs, a cigarette-stained bedside cabinet. Barlow browsed the titles. The usual suspects: reggae, obscure jazz, world music, 80s horror films, foreign art-house cinema, Palahniuk, Bukowski, William S Burroughs. There was a copy of House of Leaves lying on top, and Barlow picked it up and thumbed through the dusty pages. Someone had scrawled stuff across many of the margins—weird drawings and unreadable annotations. Certain phrases stood out, though—pestilence and segregation, the pursuit of a higher state of perception, ancient runes arranged in a concentric circle—could this be it? Barlow smile wryly at the jottings, thinking of the drug paraphernalia that Mark said had been found in the flat. The final page had no print on it, but it was filled with scrawls similar to those in the margins. Barlow read the words with an increasing sense of disquiet. The tentacles. I can hear something moving. Pipes? How deep are they? They need room to thrive. They live off the darkness. It feeds them. Dreams carry life. Mushrooms—sickly, strange, they are getting bigger. I will try them. Consume. Dreams carry life.

  We live, as we dream—alone. That was the Conrad quotation! So he hadn’t totally wasted his education. He mustered a vague smile.

  Barlow suddenly became aware of the silence. He cocked his head and listened for a few moments. Puzzled, he turned and walked back into the front room. Griff stood awkwardly in the corner, near the front door. He was pale. His eyes were wide, his mouth open. Barlow surveyed the room. Mark was crouched, rocking on his haunches. He too looked shaken. His eyes were glassy. Unfocussed.

  “What’s wrong?” said Barlow. His voice sounded frail. He stared at Mark and Griff. They returned his glance in a disconnected manner, blinking slowly. “What the fuck’s going on?”

  Jake was halfway out of the hatch, also on his hands and knees. He was motionless.

  “You all right?” He grabbed the younger lad’s coat and tugged him backwards. Jake rolled onto his side. He was shaking violently. Spasms gripped his skinny frame. Barlow bent to examine the kid. His eyes were closed but they were twitching beneath the lids. His tongue was lolling between grimaced lips. Spittle had co
llected at the corner of his mouth in white frothy loops.

  “What’s happened?” Barlow looked at the other two. Their faces were pale masks of shock. “What did you see?” Griff’s mouth was working soundlessly, like he was struggling to breathe. A sudden thought struck Barlow. “Have you eaten any of the mushrooms?”

  No one said anything. Jake was moaning quietly, disturbingly low. Barlow spotted the mobile phone on the floor, its torch facility still activated. He picked it up, crouching so he could see through the hatch.

  The light was poor, but the phone cast a feeble spotlight into the darkness. The beam was narrow. Barlow shuffled forward so he had a better view. The brickwork looked ancient. He wrinkled his nose at the sour stench. The light was almost consumed by solid darkness. It felt like the room was huge. Something about the air quality suggested it was a vast location. He was wary about venturing too far inside, but he mentally asserted himself and crawled further. He could feel cold air against his face. His fingers touched damp soil, and he recoiled at the unpleasant sensation. He could see brown mushrooms protruding through the earth. The beam picked out larger ones further back as the light quickly diminished. Some of them were thick and bulbous, maybe two feet high. Christ, how big was this place?

  Something lay partly-exposed in the soil, like a tree root or a thick pipe. It was grey and mottled, stark against the black earth. Barlow tentatively touched it, snatching his hand away as he realised it was warm. Maybe just a radiator pipe. He cautiously returned his palm against it. It felt like skin, like it was alive. Faintly he could detect movement, like a weak pulse. He chewed his lower lip and glanced round, trying to peer into the immeasurable darkness. The mushrooms seemed to watch him like silent children, brooding and sentient. He tried to identify individual specimens but they were like nothing he’d ever seen before.

  And then he noticed a strange, pale mass some distance away, partially concealed by the crop of hideous mushrooms. Intrigued, he carefully crawled over to it, grimacing at the dampness that soaked his jeans and the soil that clung to his fingers. He was squashing the fungi as he negotiated a path deeper into the room, a sensation that made him flinch. The action released a weird aroma that made his nose itch. Spores? Rotting leaves? As he drew close, a spike of fear lanced his chest. He froze.

  The pale mass trembled on the ground. Barlow directed the beam across it, illuminating snatches of ashen skin, hair, a ragged tangle of clothing. From between the bunched fragments, Barlow saw a human eye peering back, lifeless and staring. A low moan escaped his lips. He felt like reality was detaching, suddenly fearful that he was hallucinating. A cold sensation seeped through his limbs. There were several human bodies gathered here. Recently dead, by the look of it. The coppery tang of blood stung his nostrils.

  Nearby, something moved in the darkness. Barlow jerked the torch and concentrated the beam at what he took to be a monstrous mushroom. His first impression was of a brown stem about four feet high, topped with a vast dark cap. But the stem twisted slowly, and Barlow could discern human features beneath the membrane of its skin. Staring eyes, wide nostrils, thin lips. A mockery of his own image. The fucking mushroom had a face. It shifted in the soil, sprouting limbs as it struggled to release itself from the earth. There was a sound of tearing.

  Barlow scrambled across the ground, terror threatening to overwhelm him. He threw a final glimpse at the shivering mass of bodies, absently recognising Mark’s face in the nightmarish jumble. Griff’s scuffed Adidas trainers were unmistakeable among the twisted limbs.

  Light poured from the hatch. It drew him like a beacon. Barlow stumbled towards it blindly. He burst through the gap, his feet skidding on the soil. He peered up at the three figures that crouched in the room, staring back at him intently. Somehow they looked less real. Their skin was mottled, grey. Eyes blinking slowly. They regarded him in silence, shivering violently. Saliva drooled from the mouth of the one that looked like Griff. Barlow realised he was could no longer count on the help of his three friends. He was alone.

  The room reeked of decay and damp soil and the ancient breath of time. Maggoty shapes wriggled beneath the skin of the three advancing humanoids, distorting their features with spasms and bulging protrusions. Barlow registered the clammy touch of their lichen-formed fingers, seconds before he let forth his dying scream.

  HUNGRY IS THE DARK

  —BENEDICT. J. JONES—

  The air didn’t taste any different and the light looked the same. It was only the people and the places that had changed. Harry walked around the town centre drinking in the sights; everyone seemed to have a ‘phone at their ear, the clothes looked different and the shapes and angles of the cars had smoothed. But people were still people and Harry was still Harry. He set himself down on a bench with a sigh and watched the women as they shopped; high heels, freshly done hair, tight leggings like second skins, well cut clothes that clung to their figures. It was a long time since Harry had seen so many women, a long time since he had seen any woman who wasn’t a doctor, teacher or screw. As Harry looked out at the crowds thronging around the shops he occasionally caught sight of one of the dark things, they appeared in the corner of his vision as dark smudges. When he did see them Harry turned away quickly and concentrated on the more pleasant sights.

  He’d been seeing the dark things for so long that they didn’t bother him like they once did. Harry shifted himself on the seat as another dark smudge moved at the edge of his vision, this time he turned to face it. The dark thing clung to the back of a tall girl, pretty but for the sour look that marred her features. It rode high on her back like a jockey forcing its mount onwards; it was the size of a large toddler with skin that seemed so dark that it drained the light from around it. The girl swung her hips and strode away down the high street the head of the creature turned to stare at Harry. Harry stared back at the dead black eyes for a moment and then got up and walked away, the day ruined.

  ***

  Back in his cell Harry stripped down to his shorts and vest. After carefully folding his clothes he put them away in his locker. He placed his palms on the cold floor and counted off his press-ups until lights out, he reached sixty eight. In the dark he wiped the sweat from his head with a towel and then lay down on his bunk, deciding he had done well, another step taken—another step closer to release.

  Harry called his daughter, Nicola, from the blue box on the wing. He got her voicemail and left a message with the details of his pending release. He knew there was no chance of Nicola letting him stay with her but he wanted to hear her voice. He needed to know if she’d thought anymore about letting him meet his granddaughter, Rhian. Harry hung up the phone and looked around him. This place had been his home for twelve months. Before that he had spent twenty three years in Cat-A prisons up and down England. Not many like Harry in here, not as many of the dark things either.

  In here people tried to keep their noses clean, get home visits and then get free. Harry looked over the other prisoners; conmen, fraudsters, ASBO-breachers, chumps and mugs. They were the kind of people who wouldn’t mind having a nickname. In Harry’s mind the only people who had nicknames were failed boxers and black pimps. When he had first gone down for his long stretch Harry had been sent to the Scrubs and knocked heads with a joker from the Midlands called Donnie Smalls who was in on an armed robbery beef. Donnie got it into his head that everyone on the wing ought to have a nickname and he took to calling Harry—“Hatchet”. Harry told Donnie to leave it. The other cons waited and watched. To Donnie, Harry not liking his new moniker just made it funnier. Hilarious in fact until he slipped in the kitchens one day and somehow managed to hold his right hand on a grill until it resembled a crispy Peking duck. Harry never had a nickname after that and Donnie had to learn to play with himself southpaw.

  Harry sat and stared at the wall of his cell. His eyes were fixed on half a piece of A4 paper that was stuck to the wall and the five words that were on it; ‘Not forever, just a bit’. Harry had first seen the wo
rds carved into the wall of a holding cell during his trial. They had stayed with him and he tried to think on them every day. He kept his hands, palm down, on his knees and waited, time meant little to Harry. What were thirty minutes when you weighed them against two hundred and eighteen thousand four hundred and sixty five hours? Harry waited.

  ***

  “What have you ever done for me?”

  Harry stared down in his mug of tea and watched the heat rising from it like it used to do from the prison laundry presses.

  “Well?”

  He looked up at his daughter and from the set of her face he knew he’d had a wasted journey. “I just wanted to see you, Nicola, to try and say sorry. See if there was any way I could try and make up for all the wasted years.”

  Nicola slammed her tea cup down on the table. “Don’t! You can’t just stroll in here after twenty five years and think a few words will make up for it. You and your shit sent Mum into an early grave and before that you were gone anyway. Fuck you, just fuck you!”

  Harry stood up unsure of where to put his hands. He wanted to pull Nicola to him and hug her but in the end he put his hands behind his back. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to see you and Rhian, make sure you were okay.”

  Nicola shook her head silently.

  “Please, Nic . . .”

  “I think you’d better go.”

  Nicola refused to look at Harry as he left.

  ***

  There weren’t many of the old faces left but Harry did the rounds of Soho looking for something to anchor himself to. He walked the streets; D’Arblay, Berwick, Old Compton, Lexington, Old Windmill and Greek. The same streets where the Messinas had plied their trade, where Jack Spot had fought Albert Dimes and Darby Sabini had walked with a spring in his step.

  Some of the pubs were gone and the names had changed on others but a few of the old places were there, in spirit if not in fact. Harry watched the wildlife; the tramps, the drunks, the junkies, the chancers and the few working girls he could see. It seemed to him that Soho had been more honest in the days when he was running around the streets. Then the area had been more up front, in your face screaming, whereas it now seemed to be behind a veil, chastised and hidden but as dirty as ever. Harry walked and walked and then walked some more until his feet ached.