The River Dark

by Nicholas Bennett

  Weaver didn’t think so.

  He debated shaving in the bath and thought better of it. He planned to sleep the clock round anyway so what was the point? He was aware that the CD had finished and was surprised at how long he had been lying there. He listened to the quiet for a moment and focused on the voice he could hear from the café below.

  Strange. He didn't usually hear a thing.

  (aykitinoraykitinoray)

  There was an echoing cadence to it; a voice at the other end of a corridor or beneath a tunnel. Wherever it was it seemed to be growing louder. No that was wrong.

  He stepped out of the bath.

  It seemed to getting closer-some kind of chant.

  (aykitinoraykitinoray)

  Until the image from the painting flashed into his mind- the reaching figure with the inscrutable face.

  He felt the onset of panic; paralyzing fear locked him there, clutching a towel, suddenly freezing. This was ridiculous. He shook his head in an attempt to pull himself together. He struggled to catch his breath.

  The echo of the image- reaching figure, inscrutable face began to flicker like a running stick man in the corner of the pages of a child’s sketch book. It was a painting done with finger paints. It was a crayon drawing. A stick drawing. Chalk on black sugar paper. Charcoal on white until the voice was in the bathroom with him bouncing off the tiles- in the basin- in every recess of the room

  "kitinoraykitinoraykitinoray-

  all around him, drone, growl and scream, not just one but many voices. He tugged at the bathroom door handle but it was locked. He frantically jiggled the handle but it would not give. The voices were deafening and now, he realized, the noises formed words:

  Stick it in your eye Stick it in your eye Stick it in your eye

  Stick it in your eye Stick it in your eye Stick it in your eye

  Stick it in your eye Stick it in your eye Stick it in your eye

  Stick it in your eye Stick

  Weaver fell to his knees the palms of his hands jammed against the side of his head. But it was no good. The voices were inside his head now as well as all around him. Their voices were many but, at the same time, the voices were one. He watched in horror as the words Stick it in your eye were slowly traced into the steamed bathroom mirror. He closed his eyes and shook his head.

  -it in your eye Stick it in your eye Stick it in your eye Stick it in your eye-

  All at once, the voices stopped.

  There was absolute silence.

  As he knelt on the sodden bath mat with his hands pressed painfully against his ears and his eyes tightly squeezed shut, the mantra baddreambaddreambaddream attempted reassurance. I nodded off in the bath. I must have. He opened his eyes again and looked directly into the mirror.

  The scream came out of nowhere. Inhuman, invisible but ubiquitous, it filled every cavity of his being.

  The words were still there along with the reflection of a skinny dark-haired boy, standing directly behind him.

  The boy grinned at him and winked.

  Weaver was unconscious before his forehead connected with the sink.

  4

  Measton. Later.

  The two men carried the body to the water's edge without a word, the younger man was breathing hard from the exertion unlike the man in the wetsuit.

  No words had passed between them since the older man had allowed the younger man’s darkness to prevail. The girl’s inert form lay between them. It was like a dream, a dark and unspeakable dream in which the two men had defiled the dead girl with animalistic fervour.

  For a moment, Martin Clear had sensed the presences within and faltered. The shadows stepped away from the corners of his consciousness and quelled his fears with imagery, a succession of thoughts that hitherto had resided in the stagnant depths of the mind's primitive pool. A place of oblivion. Always had been. And yet, his fading consciousness flickered with remembrance of a darkness that was as old as the Fall of Man itself. The river darkness corroded Clear's fragile tunnel reality until the raw flesh of his secret self was fully exposed; it gave itself to the voices without a moment of hesitation.

  He became an instrument once more.

  They reached the water's edge and silently began to swing the girl that had been called Patsy over the water and back, a pendulum to build momentum and distance. At the optimum point both men released their grip. Patsy's corpse rose into the air and executed a strangely elegant twist before hitting the water.

  They watched as the current carried the body down stream.

  Some time later, Martin Clear was alone. Davies had taken his leave. He turned from the river and headed back through Fuck Forest.

  He had things to do.

  Patsy's corpse danced and twirled beneath the water with a grace that she could never have achieved in life until she reached the faster water of the weir. A night fisher man would have seen an arm, blue in the moonlight, as it emerged from the water executing an almost perfect front crawl as Patsy's corpse rolled against the mossy rocks beneath the cascading water of the weir. There she briefly stayed on a ledge- as though resting- until the weight of the onrushing water eased her into the darker depths of the Meas where she would be pushed and shoved by the river's infamously unpredictable under-currents.

  Chapter 3

  1

  As the hours seemed to swell into days, the days into months, he had looked out at the world from the inside of an onion, a layer at a time peeled away making the distorted voices lucid by degree, blurred faces sharp once more. It was a comfortable numbness for a while; the world of money and deadlines, relationships and anxiety was gone into the psychological hinterland, a dream of reality signifying little, reduced to the sound of distant traffic.

  For a while he was a child once more, recovering from a horrible accident. Little Davey Weaver, five years old, he looked out from his bubble and saw concerned faces; his mummy looking worried and old, his ex-girlfriend, Fern, sitting next to his friend Paul; all of them mouthing words of comfort and exchanging anxious looks.

  Funny how Fern and Paul were there, he had thought. He wouldn't meet either of them for almost twenty years.

  His leg didn't hurt anymore either; he must have been there for a long, long time.

  Grant came to see him in the early days, when he was so far inside the onion he couldn't hear anyone speaking and was unable to focus on people's faces. Grant wouldn't say anything either; rather he would sit inside the glass with Davey, grinning that malicious old grin despite Davey's questions about how he had managed to survive the river. In his dreams, he saw Grant's face looking at him from below the surface, eyes wide and vacant, hand out stretched as he was sucked down by the

  (it's the undercurrent, y' see, it's vicious)

  current, growing smaller and darker as he receded into the depths.

  And in the depths of his dreams he saw his childish self bent over a sketchpad with one tongue poking at the corner of his mouth as he drew the figure- the inscrutable figure- with broad black crayon while the soundtrack played the concerned sounds of his mother and a deeper, impossibly rational voice telling her it's perfectly natural, a conscious way of dealing with the trauma. And all the while, there was Grant, grinning back at him from the depths of his reflection.

  But as the layers peeled away, exposing him to bitter reality, his friend began to fade until one fresh January morning Davey surfaced and looked into the face of a bearded man with kind eyes.

  The man smiled at him. "Good morning, Mister Weaver," he said brightly and held out his hand. Davey took it in his; it was gripped warmly and briefly. "I'm Julian. You are safe and sound and in the care of the Royal Sussex Hospital and I'm your doctor."

  Strolling through the grounds of the hospital a week later, even that meeting was tinged with the surreal.

  Despite his early imaginings, Weaver's delirium had lasted twenty-four hours, not days and weeks and this was his sixth day at the unit. He spoke openly and honestly with James but was mor
e guarded with some of the others. He knew the drill. Doctors and nurses seemed to want to put a label on his “condition” and that scared him almost as much as the idea that he might actually have a condition. He had lied to Julian (first name only, no prefix denoting medical status, no fascist labeling here in Right-on Brighton) without hesitation. For a moment he even thought that the bearded psychiatrist had believed him too. He'd told the psychiatrist that he'd taken some strong acid and that he'd had a bad trip that was all. The lecture that followed was as half-hearted as it was predictable. The dangers of drugs et cetera. The irony of the fact that Julian had then prescribed Weaver a whole sweet shop of pharmaceuticals was not lost on doctor or patient. Timothy Leary and his LSD therapy; a man sentenced to thirty-seven years incarceration for possession of half a joint in Orange County. Leary had extolled the virtues of LSD and its positive life affecting possibilities if guided correctly. One look at Julian was affirmation of the doctor's own experimentation with acid. You just knew, Weaver thought. Moreover, Julian knew that he knew. After they had acted out the charade and played their expected parts to bored perfection, Julian lost interest and left Weaver to see out his mandatory stay. Because the police had sectioned him, Weaver had only to see out a week under mild observation which meant a host of bored psych assistants being in the same room for long periods of the day.

  Following the episode in the bathroom, Weaver had regained consciousness and ran down to the ground floor patisserie ranting about demons. If that wasn't enough to disturb the customers, the fact that he was naked was sufficient for police involvement and the subsequent section procedure.

  Naked, for fuck's sake.

  As his initial terror of having lost it faded (no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't think of it in any way other way than in that ridiculous term), Weaver wanted nothing more than to be back in his own world, a world away from medication, fellow patients with the telltale brown smudges beneath their eyes and the endless rolled cigarettes. He craved the relative normality of his life. There were times, lay in his bed listening to the assorted sounds of human frailty from the others on the ward, when he feared that he would never find normal again, that something fundamental had shifted setting him on a different, terrifyingly uncertain path. The curse of hindsight left him damning his previously cynical mindset to those around him and what his life had become. What had seemed mediocre became the object of his dreams. How could he go back to his life now? He didn't think he'd be getting anymore bread and soup left on the stairs he shared with the patisserie staff. And behind all of his thoughts was the constant nagging certainty that he was losing his sanity.

  "So you're sure you didn't paint it?" James asked again.

  James- The Predator- King accompanied him on his daily walk around the hospital grounds. Weaver had taken up smoking again after three years; everyone else seemed to, so he almost felt honour bound to join them- endless rollies between a selection of yellowed and chewed fingernails. When he wasn't asleep or staring at afternoon game shows presented by middle-aged men in loud jackets with orange sun tans, he walked and talked with the various young psychiatric nursing assistants that came and went in eight hourly cycles. There was Neil with the pony tail, Claire with the shaven head, Fiona with the sensational tits and James. James was a giant at six-six, close on three hundred pounds; a striking figure even in Brighton where weirdness seemed to be a pre-requisite, his blonde dreadlocks hung at shoulder length. His face was framed with a well-cultivated beard, shaved into unusual stripes. As a result of his size and hairstyle, the other nurses referred to him as The Predator after the alien in the Schwarzenegger film of the same name. Weaver was comfortable with James. The others just seemed to be waiting for their shifts to end; they were passing through, thinking about what they were going to do with the rest of their day. But James was really there.

  "That's the trouble- no, I'm not sure of anything now."

  James sat down on a bench recently vacated by a girl with scratches on her arms and patchy hair. His enormous bulk caused the bench to protest. The floor was littered with cigarette ends. He sighed.

  "You know, I was thinking about what your friend Paul said to you, about it being some kind of self-portrait-"

  "Impossible." Weaver sat down on the grass at James' feet. "I know my own style for one thing. For another, why would I blank out the painting of a picture? I've been beating myself up about not being able to complete anything of quality for weeks now. The odd thing is, I do feel some kind of association with the piece," he continued, thinking aloud. He had told James this before. "It means something to me, I know it does but what that may be I just don't know."

  "So it is good then?"

  Weaver grinned. "It's striking," he conceded.

  "But you read about this kind of stuff all the time. Automatic writing. People displaying skills they never dreamed of under hypnosis. Shit, I dunno. Haven't you ever read The Fortean Times?"

  Weaver laughed quietly, thinking of Paul. "I know a man that subscribes."

  "Okay. Now, I shouldn't be talking in this way as your psychiatric nurse,” James feigned paranoid looking around, his dreadlocks whipping through the air. “I don't want to encourage paranoia and inappropriate thoughts and all that shit- but you seem fine to me."

  "Thanks."

  "Welcome. But what I'm trying to say is: this shit does happen. People do have psychic flashes about their sister on the other side of the Atlantic having a car crash.”

  “I can accept that kind of thing,” Weaver muttered.

  “That’s right,” the nurse continued. “There are too many cases from too many ordinary people to ignore. Whether it's your granny praying to St. Anthony for her precious wedding ring to turn up, some old biddy talking to the dead and telling you where your husband hid his priceless stamp collection or finding out that you were Sitting Bull in a previous life while under hypnosis, you've got to start believing some of it. There's too much of it and it's not all from some inbred farmer out in the middle of an American cornfield either."

  Weaver laughed again.

  "So what are you saying? It was painted by aliens?"

  James arched a pierced eyebrow. "Don't be facetious. Be open-minded to the possibilities."

  "I can’t believe that you're encouraging me to think along those lines. Aren't you supposed to report on my obsessive, inappropriate thoughts?"

  "Hmm." James tossed back his dreadlocks. "Maybe that's why you get to go after a week and I've been here for two years."

  Weaver mused for a while. "You know, I'm not narrow-minded about unexplained phenomena but the idea of wondering around in a trance painting someone else's vision doesn't sit well with me."

  "Of course it doesn't but do you think that backwater country bumpkin wants to be obsessed with the idea that he has been abducted by Grays? No fucking way."

  Weaver thought of the dark-haired boy with the devilish smile.

  "I've been thinking about the boy in the bathroom. I knew him when I was a child. He saved my life and died as a result."

  James nodded, said nothing, allowed Weaver to continue.

  “He jumped in to the river to save me from drowning and drowned himself,” Weaver said in a monotone.

  James scratched his beard. "Do you think about him much?"

  Weaver considered.

  "Not so much any more."

  'Do you avoid thinking about him?"

  "I –" He paused. That was a good question. Considering what had happened, the dramatic nature of that fateful day and the traumatic weeks that had followed, it was surprising that he didn't think about Grant more often. "I owe him my life."

  James folded his arms and looked up at the Victorian building that housed Green Fields Psychiatric Unit. "If I was Julian, I’d be jotting down words like deep-seated guilt right about now."

  "Maybe. It's hard to accept that someone gave their life for you. The what-ifs tend to keep you awake at night."

  James nodded. "What if you'd die
d, you mean?"

  "No. What if he'd lived?"

  That was the crux of it, Weaver thought. What if that wild and rebellious boy had lived? Would he have continued demolishing windows, skipping school and hating the police? Perhaps he'd have discovered a life changing talent, had a calling to the priesthood, been influenced by an enigmatic teacher as he had been, someone to open his eyes to his own potential.