The River Dark

by Nicholas Bennett

  He ran into the night, the sound of the laughter swelling in his head. He sprinted down the alleyway only stopping at the first decent street light on the corner of

  Second Avenue. From there, he could see the assortment of bins outside his building well enough despite the night. He watched intently waiting for his- what? - assailant/joker/weirdo? - to show himself.

  Weaver felt ashamed of himself then- embarrassed by his own weakness- but the idea of going back into the dark to confront some nutcase was macho bullshit. He was still breathing hard after ten minutes. It was almost two in the morning, there was nothing open nearby and he was skint any way. He also needed to go to the toilet very badly.

  Still he waited. No sign of anyone. He could be inside he thought, just waiting for an opportunity.

  Weaver headed back out into the night.

  3

  Beneath Measton, at the exact moment of Weaver’s flight down the darkened stairwell two hundred miles away, Andrew Davies was confronted by a different type of darkness.

  It was his own darkness that undid him.

  At the same time he had discovered the joys of scuba diving in the azure waters of the Andaman Sea and being athletic of body and of a steely disposition soon attained the advanced level, he had also discovered his own capacity for pursuing the unthinkable.

  He'd buried it for years, only occasionally betrayed by the traitorous erection in the presence of his nieces, limiting himself to rare inebriated fantasies.

  In the tunnel beneath the ruins of the abbey, focused on the narrow field of vision afforded by his flashbeam, his darkness enveloped him. He remembered his first in Vietnam. Impossibly young but impossibly experienced. Young old eyes looking up at him, remote and indifferent. Never again, he had told himself. Never. He had cried with shame in the claustrophobic air-conditioned room in the back-packer district. Cried with shame, cried for the death of innocence; whether for his innocence or that of the girl, he did not know. He had cried any way. The next night he was out there again though, seeking younger eyes, eyes that did not belie that terrible indifference. That night he did not cry. He shook his head, again causing water to enter his face mask and tried to dismiss these harrowing reminiscences. But it wasn’t that simple.

  In the tunnel beneath the Abbey ruins, Davies felt as though he was being probed. Thoughts that he had trained to stay locked behind closed doors pervaded his consciousness.

  He breathed the compressed air deeply and slowly, shining his torch on the tunnel immediately before him. The darkness seemed to be thickening if that was possible, becoming dense, less penetrable with each stroke of the fin. He should turn back, he knew but desire would not allow it. Wasn't that always the way for him though? Desire led to darkness.

  Again he felt as though his thoughts were not his own; his inner secret resurfacing again and again. Neurosis, surely.

  As a teacher he had honed his ability to hide these inner secrets. No Internet use, suspect friendships, lingering glances at the younger girls, nothing. He hardly even thought about it during term time. His strict regime of workouts, research and planning kept him occupied. Besides, he still liked fucking women (with his eyes tightly shut in the dark, imagining something entirely different) so he was pretty normal, wasn't he?

  Davies realized then that the darkness was something more than a trick of the mind. It seemed physical, almost tangible. The darkness all around him had pervaded everything was sending exploratory dark fingers into the shadowed recesses of his conscience.

  Panic threatened to overwhelm him. This is real.

  There was intelligence all around him unlocking the secrets in his head with ease. He began to sense a grim satisfaction, a mockery and- above all else- the immense power of the darkness. He shook his head violently. He could not afford to panic. Still, his heart began to trip hammer in his chest. He was hyper-ventilating, the bubbles spilling frantically from his regulator.

  There were words inside his head. Neurosis. It had to be. Somehow I've got neurosis. I have some of the symptoms- I'm not thinking straight-I'm-

  Davies began to flail against the inexorable pull of the darkness, all sense of safety gone. The darkness was all around him now, reaching into his head, tapping at memories like crows on a window ledge tapping at glass. Davies tried to turn back. At 180 degrees of his about face, his consciousness wavered and failed him.

  Davies' body hung limp in the water until, some time later, Davies began to drift back into the darkness.

  *

  Layers of darkness surrounded the inert figure. It had been so simple. As simple as it always was with the weak and they were all weak. The darkness had only to seek out the secrets in men’s hearts as it had done for all time. The darkness infiltrated the subconscious of the diver once again and gloried in the coldness of the fresh darkness that it found there, a darkness that was capable of manipulating the innocent for nothing more than the most superficial and temporary physical satisfaction; a darkness that enabled the diver to live in absolute denial of what he had become. It was physical pleasure that provided the way of undoing men.

  Always had been, would be always.

  *

  Later still.

  I'm dead, he thought. He listened intently, holding his breath.

  Only the drip of water occasionally broke the silence.

  Davies was in complete darkness, the left side of his face pressed into the mud or whatever the composition of this place was.

  "Hello?" The acoustic was shallow. Low ceiling. "Is there anybody there?"

  No-one answered.

  He was out of the water but still wet. He ran his hands over his body. Wet suit still on. He tried to sit up; his back cramped and he lay back again. Davies tried to piece together the events before he'd lost consciousness. He'd had some kind of neurotic episode; there were voices, paranoid delusions. He must have drifted on. There had been a tide moving him on after all. Then he had ended up here, wherever here was. He blinked rapidly; there was no light source only a blanket wall of darkness. His hand touched something dry and scabrous making him flinch away in horror.

  The torch. Of course. He had a dim memory of putting his spare into his BCD pocket. He fumbled for it, his heart racing with hope. His fingers touched upon it. He let out an involuntary gasp of delight. It was a less powerful torch running on alkaline batteries but it was light. Sweet glorious light. He flicked the button and illuminated the chamber and immediately wished he was still in the dark.

  The chamber was about five feet high and twice as wide. There was a false shore to his left; he had obviously emerged from there and crawled a few feet before passing out again. The walls were smooth, manmade and slick with algae; the floor was comprised of muddy flagstones. There was a heavy wooden door, curiously out of place, to his right. It was bolted. It should have been everything that he'd dreamed of- hidden antechambers, signs of secrecy, manmade passages, doors opened to uncloak mysteries and who knew what else. But this was a nightmare.

  He counted six corpses, each in different stages of decomposition. His hand had brushed against something that seemed to flake away like pastry. That would have been what remained of the nearest corpse's deteriorated face. The eyes had been eaten away years before leaving tunnels akin to those he had entered, a yellowed peel of skin flapped over the forehead like wallpaper in a slum tenement, wisps of dark hair floated around the skull while the ragged cloth around the rib cage still bore the shape of a t-shirt. The corpse lay on its side with one arm outstretched towards the misplaced door, the fleshless fingers long ago picked clean, unlike the cadaver sat to the right of that portal.

  It was the corpse of a young woman; her flesh was in the final stages of putrefaction but the clothing still relatively intact. Her eyes had fallen back into the sockets but the skin had not gone; it had merely withdrawn, stretched taught across the cheeks, grooved where the residue of flesh remained. The bones of the others were beyond reckoning such was their age. They lay in separate pil
es amid crumbling rags and dust.

  Davies struggled to his feet, the weight of the cylinder shifting uncomfortably; he removed the cylinder and placed it away from the lapping river water along with his fins and mask.

  He stood in front of the door as though in a trance; there was certainly reason to be curious but there was more to this. Again he felt the sensation of being drawn. He knew he should have felt fear at all he had seen, at how he had come to be there at all but he felt nothing but the overwhelming resignation of one that has surrendered to inevitability.

  Davies reached for the ancient bolt. He drew it across and tried to pull at the door; it came slowly despite the years of river-muck against the ancient wood. For a moment he had the sense of something behind the door, something unspeakable

  and then

  the room

  changed.

  He felt the temperature and humidity rise; new scents and sounds assailed his senses. The babble and sing-song of oriental voices, the smell of raw sewage in the near distance along with the warm aroma of spiced meats from within the building around him. The idea that he was hallucinating, hypnotized, being controlled, flickered in his mind for a millisecond before the thought was extinguished along with any sense of a shift in time or space. Davies had no sense that this was a memory in the same way that a dreamer does not know that he dreams.

  Davies' mind entered a room that he had been in before; a squalid room off a stinking backstreet. He felt the presence of the girl's mother and pimp behind him, felt her reassuring hand upon his shoulder. The shape of the girl drew him; she sat on her knees behind a veil of mosquito netting. He went to her and the darkness possessed him.

  Chapter Two

  1

  Brighton

  January 15th 2001

  7.20am

  "I didn't paint this," he said. He turned to where Paul sheltered beneath his faithful blanket, unmoved since Weaver had left, after midnight, the previous night. Paul often slept at the studio; it was warmer than his room at the house he shared with friends near Preston Park. Weaver had intended a return to the studio after his strange encounter on the stairs to his flat, another night flaked out in the hot rock patterned armchair that had been donated by a broken-up squat but hadn’t made it. He felt jaded and frozen to the marrow after a night of wandering the streets.

  "I definitely didn't do this," he said again.

  Paul shrugged, nonchalance personified. "No-one else here, mate."

  "Someone else has been here. That is not mine. I don't do people, portraits, whatever the fuck that is."

  Paul reached for his tin. He'd been awake for ten minutes. Time for a smoke. "Who do you think did it, then? It wasn't me. I can't paint. Perhaps some one brought it round while I was out of it."

  "No, the place was locked when I got back. Who else has a key?"

  "My dad," Paul sighed looking for his lighter. "He definitely can't paint."

  "It's on the floor," Weaver told him absently. He reached up and touched the canvas. It was thick with dark gouache. Heavy application. Dark hues. His fingertips came away sticky and the colour of swamp mud. "Any way, it's still wet." A thought occurred to him. He began to search through his paint boxes. "Fuck sake!"

  "What now? Here, ‘old up!" Paul dodged an empty tube.

  "Cheeky bastard used my paint."

  "Mate," Paul began to heat a lump of compressed cannabis. "Who could it have been but you?"

  Weaver shook his head staring at the dark figure seeming to reach out of the canvas once again. It was striking though. Ugly, dark, a bit disturbing but it was good. Not his style. Better than me, he thought grimly. The author of this vision had a style of his own- the ability to create a swirling menace that was far from Weaver’s disciplined, often stilted, methods. Was it feasible that someone could have sneaked in by Paul's sleeping form during the night and created this disturbing number in a dimly lit room? Anything was possible. When Paul was out of it, it was difficult to rouse him at all. The fact that he was awake a little after 7 was surprising enough. If it had been sketched out, maybe even given a base, it could have been done, he thought. Who could do it though? And more importantly: why? The studio had become a drop-in centre for the weird and the wonderful over the last year or so. Paul seemed to know every art fart in Sussex along with the usual array of Crusties and Goths. There were artists among them and they all loved the studio. It was a luxury none of them could afford.

  Paul’s studio was a hodge-podge of furniture and artwork, a cornucopia of junk and machine parts, works forgotten and works in progress. Paul's latest creations made a miniature Middle Earth of two large work benches pushed up against the far wall. Weaver's easels stood by the sash windows which, despite the sunken level of the studio, afforded good light in the afternoons. During warmer months Weaver would open the windows and let the sounds and smells of the sea front into the place. They were a five minute stroll down to the beach. Real des res. A significant portion of the floor space was used as storage for friends that had moved on, gone traveling, went to prison, died- who knew? They had forgotten where much of it came from; some of it had seemed to materialize out of nowhere. Paul often said it was reproducing. When he couldn't get going, which was most of the time recently, Weaver would pick through cartons of comic books, piece together an old engine, finish sanding off a wood carving or simply look at things to pass the time. He had even taken to helping out with Paul's Gandalfs and Gimlis; with his natural eye for detailed painting it was pleasantly mindless work. It also helped justify his continuing presence at the studio; he contributed little else. There was a walk-in closet to the rear of the studio with the sum total of what Weaver regarded as his life as a serious artist. He was beginning to suspect that it was all shit really. Attractive, mildly interesting shit. Not that it mattered though. The studio, a large open-plan basement flat, belonged to Paul's father, a man with the luxury of enough money to forget about one of his smaller property investments. Paul didn't seem to mind his friends freeloading but Weaver couldn't live like that. He didn't even like signing on. He was lucky. Paul had selected him for some unknown reason. They had hardly known each other. He was quiet and enjoyed Paul's continual brand of sardonic humour. Paul was also sympathetically sensitive regarding Weaver's recent barren spell. Weaver suspected that Paul was a secret Hippy fan but, if he was, he’d never mentioned the fact despite the old copies of the News lying around the place.

  It had started three months before. Why? He had no idea. It was as though his creative mind had been taken in hand like an old dish rag and wrung out until it was bone dry. He could still draw and paint of course but that was like telling a novelist with writer's block that he could still take solace in the fact that he was still literate. If anything, his ability to replicate a style with paint was a further aggravation. He could not even accomplish what he had regarded as his bread and butter work. He had made a consistent return on his renderings of cult icons in his particular kaleidoscopic style. Similarly the sketches sold well. It seemed people couldn't get enough of Bob Marley smoking joints done in pastel or paint. It was the style that had made his stand out and that was the problem now. To realize this combination of originality and iconic imagery required some imagination and that was the problem it seemed. Without the income provided by the seafront shops, he might as well get a job in a factory, filling pies. Thank fuck he'd drawn enough Hippy strips for the next few months.

  The East Sussex News paid a monthly retainer into his bank account for five comic strips a week. The Hippy character was a throwback to his festival-going teens. Hippy was a sly piss-take of all that drug culture garbage; conspiracy theories, armchair paranoia, loose morality, living room revolutionaries, bizarre LSD experiences and lately, PC banner waving. His character, Hippy, was currently taking every self-help course on the market; on the advice of the sub-editor of the Entertainment Today section he was moving away from the "studenty stuff" into the middle-aged ex-hippy market. Hippy had a following. He
still felt nervous adrenalin whenever he saw the little cartoon tucked in the bottom corner of the back page of the News with his name, David Weaver, in the first panel under the psychedelic Hippy banner. He thought of Hippy as his little friend. He paid the lion's share of the rent, after all. His little friend had also afforded him the luxury of being able to work on his “serious” projects although that had become something of a joke in itself.

  At the time of his "block" he'd been working on the piece provisionally called Nirvana Mark IV. It was the fourth canvas working towards a rendering of a vision a friend had described to him, having tried peyote in the Peruvian rain forest. The central idea was an expansion of three stars in a clear night sky. He was pursuing the sense of approach; the feeling that the astral bodies were drawing near. The next phase would involve the visions within each star. It had been going reasonably well. He liked the idea and found the composition enough to hold his attention. He had the idea that a series of paintings in this style would sell to a small gallery come bookshop that he knew in Camden Town that ran a line in the esoteric. All he had to do was the one thing that he enjoyed most: paint.