The River Dark

by Nicholas Bennett

  *

  4

  She had tried to sleep in vain. Too much was happening and too quickly. Not only had she seen a poor girl unceremoniously pulled out of the river that day and had conversations of such strangeness as to leave her breathless but she felt the nervous adrenalin within that accompanied new love.

  Mary sat up against piled pillows and sipped her bedside water. She heard the distant sirens with that feeling that she had come to recognize as vague but at the same time undeniable. Bad things were happening. The Welsh Witch strikes again. She looked at the clock. Just before twelve of course. The witching hour. She thought about phoning David Weaver and dismissed the thought out of hand. What was happening to her? Twenty-four hours ago the idea of telephoning a man because she felt nervous anxiety would have seemed ridiculous. She picked up her book and tried to read. Having read the same paragraph three times with little or no comprehension, she gave up to her pre-occupations. The conversations of that afternoon returned once more.

  The painting, her dream of the night before, the boy guiding John-o to his friend. Grant? How could that be? It was impossible. She believed in aspects of the supernatural- yes. She was testimony to the fact that there was more to Heaven and Earth than most people believed. But she had never considered aspects of the supernatural beyond her own ability to foresee in dreams or to have that vague feeling that something of import was about to occur, to think of someone that she hadn't seen in years only for them to turn up like the proverbial penny shortly afterwards. This was more than that. Visions and ghosts, demonic screams from plugholes, paintings painting themselves. She sipped her water thoughtfully. If all of this was connected, why was it all happening now? What did it signify?

  There were also murders to consider. Perhaps even the attack on Susan Callaghan. Now that she thought about it, could she include the apparent madness of Callaghan and Andrew Davies? If so, there was a sickness in this town, something in the water. She looked gloomily at the contents of her glass and put it back on the bedside table.

  She mused on the town that she had known all of her life. It had its dark side, she knew that much. But didn't all towns have that? After all, everyone had a little darkness in them. She had experienced the cruelty of children –gypo, diddy-coy, diddy coy- cor, what's that stink?- and the cold snobbery of the women that came into her shop. She knew what it was to have a man drunkenly beat you like a dog and then curl up next to you apologising and sniveling like a child. She knew the darkness of men's souls from bitter experience. Her father, Madman- a nickname that was well-earned- could turn in an instant, the warm-hearted generous bear of a man replaced with a viper tongued monster, lashing out blindly at those close to him, even his little Welsh witch. The men that had come and gone during his absences and after his death had been no better- in many ways worse- leaving her mother psychologically and sometimes physically damaged for days in which she would drift around the rooms where they lived above the shop, hollow-eyed and wraith-like in her dark dressing gown.

  That was the reason at the heart of Mary’s preference to live alone. God knew she had received generous offers and been courted by one or two decent men but she’d consistently struggled to warm to them. When they got too close, she backed away into the storeroom that was her life, among the baked beans and ketchup bottles. She didn't need anyone in her life. Until now, she thought and shook her head.

  David Weaver. It all seemed so unlikely. The boy that had been Grant's hangalong. The boy that Grant had saved. A skinny man from Brighton with hippy values who drew pictures of a cartoon hippy for a living. A man who-

  Glass tinkled downstairs.

  She held her breath and listened intently.

  There it was again. The sound of glass on the tiled floor of the store room. Yes. It had to be the store room. It was the only window that wasn't alarmed because in order to access that window you had to be some kind of athlete. The square yard outside of the storeroom was surrounded by a ten foot brick wall. Breaking in from there was practically impossible she had thought. More importantly, Madman had thought the same and his experience meant that his opinion carried some authority.

  Nevertheless there was someone downstairs. She heard the sound of boxes sliding away from the window so that the culprit could climb in to the room.

  She picked up the telephone and punched in 999. The line was busy. She put down the receiver and tried again with the same result. She felt momentary panic threatening to overwhelm her. She breathed deeply. Call someone else. Something popped explosively downstairs as it smashed onto the floor making her jump. She tried the police once more. Busy tone.

  Mary dressed quickly. She pulled on tracksuit trousers, an old V-neck sweater and slid her feet into her Nike trainers. She passed through the hallway with its tasteful prints, so different to the calendar nudes of Madman's era, and picked up her rubber-handled torch, nervously feeling its lethal weight in her hand. She carefully drew back the deadbolt and turned the key in the door that opened out onto the steps that led down to the shop. She paused and listened.

  This was foolish. She should try the police again.

  No.

  John Madman Moran’s genes reared up in her; she felt a flush of anger and outrage that someone thought that they could come into her shop and take her livelihood while she slept soundly upstairs. She took the steps purposefully until she reached the dingily lit annex of between the storeroom and the shop. Aprons and overalls hung limply against the paint-peeled door. She had never bothered with this corridor. What was the point? Only she and a few others ever saw it. Guests came to the side entrance with its waist high brick-walled flower garden, cobbled path and stain glassed window set in a racing green porch. She placed hanging baskets there in the summer. But this was the tradesman's entrance to the shop. The key, as always, hung on a crooked nail a few inches above the door handle. Madman again. She remembered the day that he’d tapped in that nail all too well.

  Mary turned the key and, ever-so-quietly, stepped into the shop.

  *

  5

  Measton was changing. As the rain continued to pummel the fields and market gardening land, causing the irrigation ditches to overflow into the roads that ran out of town towards Rennick, the town was gripped by the primordial instinct to survive.

  They had experienced flood many times. The river would burst over its cultivated banks and onto the memorial gardens of Riverside, drowning the flower beds as it lapped over the grass and onto the pavement beyond. Soon the river would widen to twice its breadth as it crept across the road and sidled up against the walls of the hotels, restaurants and antique shops beyond. In the Measton Hotel there was a famous oft printed photograph (especially during times of flood) of a flat capped man and his son rowing down the middle of the road on Riverside. Grainy, black and white hotel guests gaped and pointed at the spectacle from the dry safety of the upper floor windows, their spontaneous reaction preserved for all time along with their antiquity. The bronze plaque bottom centre of the photograph read: Father and Son. Measton Flood, 1933. Another plaque, this one stone, was exhibited three feet four inches from the pavement on the door to the Royal Oak Coach House marking the highest watermark in known history in that same year 1933 but there was another side to the floods that year.

  Fourteen had drowned. It was the undercurrent, you see.

  Tonight the river was at breaking point and those that bothered to note such things knew that, if the rain continued to fall, the river would spill onto the memorial gardens once more. When it happened, there were few to see it. By eleven-thirty, the streets were deserted.

  On Cornhill, puddles of water had filled the ill-maintained roads causing the occasional car to send waves slopping onto the uneven pavements while streams of rain water became torrents gushing into the storm drains. The detritus of human settlement floated and swirled in the tides, gathering in drain grids a collage of washed out packaging and paper. At the other end of town, the drive ways and lands
caped gardens were a cultivated marshland behind locked security gates; night lights flickered in the drizzle while at the Blacks' house the yellow crime scene tape flapped and cracked in the bluster that swept along the valley from Rennick. On High Street there was nothing but the sshhhh of the occasional car carefully negotiating the treacherous sheen of the road while a hooded silhouette would scurry home, shoulders hunched against the spitefully freezing February rain. The sirens had ceased wailing their baleful song as seven crews battled in vain to put out the fire at Measton High. The following morning it would be a series of smouldering lumps against the slate greyness of the season, lumps that had once resembled buildings. But, by then, attentions would be turned elsewhere.

  But there was movement. Figures passed through the shadows seemingly practiced in the art of covert operations. Off the shambles, a man that had spoken to an increasingly bedraggled Martin Clear stood in his back garden waiting for his wife's late night visitor.

  In the bedsit where David Weaver had “babysat” with Alison Haines many years before, Krzysztof told his fellow migrant workers what he had been told the travelers had planned. The travelers were pissed off at the way the foreigners had come in and taken their seasonal work. There was going to be a war, Krzysztof told them. None of them questioned his authority on this matter.

  The rain continued to pour. Measton continued to change.

  *

  6

  Ben couldn't believe his luck when Tracy had called him at 11.15. Hubby had been called away to his parents' house up north- a family emergency. He wouldn't be back for days. The thought that taking advantage of such a family crisis was wrong crossed his mind but only fleetingly. His balls throbbed dully as they had done continuously it seemed over a period of weeks. He couldn't believe his luck. That afternoon he had sweated and rolled with Tracy for two unbelievable hours. Tracy did things that Ben had only read about in porn mags. He had never been as horny in his life. And now she wanted more. He could hardly believe his luck.

  On

  Cedar Street he paused and looked over to the netted window behind which his fantasies unfolded. He felt uneasy. What if it was a trap and hubby knew? What if he had bullied Tracy into calling him so that he could kick the shit out of him when he walked into the house? Hadn’t Tracy sounded a little strange on the phone? Yes she had. Paranoia. He crossed the puddled street and strode purposefully up to the front door. He knew that his fears would be allayed as soon as he felt Tracy's burning wetness around him. He shuddered and pressed the bell. Tracy answered the door instantly.

  "Hello lover," she crooned and reached out for his belt. She pulled him into the house by the buckle. He saw that, once again, she was wearing the semi-transparent teddy that had engorged him to such an extent that afternoon and was a little disappointed. She could have done something different. Wavering he said: "Got anything to drink?" She looked at him- what? – drunkenly, it seemed and swayed a little. "Le's ju' go upstrairs." Great, he thought. He felt mild disappointment.

  "Are you pissed?" he asked, sounding a little nervous to his ears. She looked at him, smiled seductively and slid out of her teddy, revealing her pert breasts first, nipples hard and dark, almost brown, before letting it sidle over her hips showing him the smoothness of her shaved pelvis. She kicked the garment away and stood before him, legs slightly apart. She reached down between her legs and began stroking herself.

  "Does it matter?" She asked. It didn't matter. Ben followed her upstairs barely noticing the overturned furniture in the kitchen as they passed its open doorway.

  *

  7

  While Julian Knight was preoccupied with Martha in their preferred style, Andrew Davies visited all of the sleeping patients on the secure ward.

  One-by-one, they were awoken.

  On the monitors it seemed that Davies simply stood at the end of their beds with his mouth stretched into an endless yawn but each inmate seemed to be listening as though Davies was articulating words.

  By the time Knight collapsed back into his chair, squashing Carl Jung as he did so, Andrew Davies was back in his bed, once again silent and still. Glancing at the monitors, Julian was pleased to see that all of the patients were sleeping soundly.

  8

  Weaver awoke from a disturbing dream. It was the same old dream but with a telling difference. In this dream the subject was Mary rather than his mother.

  He had dreamt of his mother over a period of weeks before her death. Dreamt of her falling towards the river from the bridge. A different bridge, not the railway bridge but the Old Bridge as it was known- the bridge from which he had thrown his mother's wedding ring, learning the pain of regret even as it had left his hand to begin its inevitable descent into the river.

  In the remote view of the dreamer, he observed from the other side of the road as his mother, dressed in her favourite blue and red trimmed dress, walked purposefully with her macramé shopping bag at her side. Then her feet would leave the pavement but she would continue to stride oblivious to her levitation like a figure from the twister sequence in The Wizard of Oz. She rose until she passed over the bridge wall and then began to descend towards the sludgy waters below. Weaver would wake up in a sweat of bedclothes before she touched the river until the night when he had watched in helpless horror as her feet entered the water. He woke up to the terrifying sound of the telephone; calls after midnight always heralded bad news. That was the night she had died. This time it was Mary.

  He had awoken before she could touch the water but only just.

  As he crossed the hall into the lounge, an intuition caused him to look over his shoulder. Nothing. He shivered. He picked up the telephone and punched in Mary's number from memory. How quickly we form alliances. How soon we memorise the telephone numbers of those we admire.

  He listened to the ringing tone for half a minute and then replaced the handset.

  Stupid.

  Was it though? Could he really continue to ignore the signs with all that was happening?

  He pressed redial and waited for Mary to answer. Better to be foolish and wrong, he could take that. At least sleep would come easier. Come on, Mary, answer. No reply. He slammed the phone back into its cradle and went to the spare bedroom. He dressed hurriedly and looked in on the girls. They were both sleeping. He considered waking the elder sister but settled instead for scrawling a note in his cartoon bubble dialogue style on the pad kept on the kitchen table for such purposes.

  He unlocked the door and opened it to see the shadow swing a fist at him. The blow caught Weaver squarely on the chin causing him to fall back into the apartment. The man stepped into the light and, in the moment before he lunged at Weaver's throat, he saw the contorted face of the man that had been his uncle.

  9

  Above Secondhand Bargains on

  Ash Road, Jean Hodgkinson tottered around on the darkened stairwell waiting for her son- the fuckin' junkie- to get off his arse and answer the fucking door. She hammered on the scabby red door once more. She reached into her handbag, littered with paracetamol bottles, lipstick and lottery scratch cards and found one of her cigarettes. She lit it with a shaking hand. She’d been drinking since lunchtime.

  Where the fuck was he? Little shit.

  It was about time he gave her something. When she thought of everything she had sacrificed for him her head waggled with indignation. He was twenty-eight years old and still relied on handouts from honest tax payers such as herself . Never mind the fact that she was claiming- she hadn’t been well. But it was time he got himself a fucking job so he could give his poor mother a hand every now and then.

  The door clicked and opened two inches.

  “About fucking time,” she muttered.

  She pushed the door in and noticed the stink. Filthy bastard. Too stoned out of his head to wash. She entered Sean's one-room bedsit and saw that he was not alone. He sat opposite another young man, their knees almost touching. She vaguely recognized the stranger. He looked rough thoug
h, like he'd been sleeping on the streets. She put him at about nineteen; patchy fuzzes of stubble covered his cheeks and neck and his dark hair was a wild mess, giving him the appearance of cockerel. Neither man turned to look at her.

  "Have you been injecting that shit into your veins again, have you?" She barked at Sean. He did not respond but continued to look unblinking at his new friend. "Course you 'ave. You're a fuckin' junkie." Still no response.

  She had other buttons to press though.

  "It's no good ignoring me," she snapped. "What would your poor father think? His son and heir, nothing more than a fuckin' smack'ead."

  Both men turned their heads to look at her. She almost recoiled at the remoteness of their gaze. Sean got up and took the two steps to where she swayed. She saw that he held a syringe in his hand but too late.

  He plunged the syringe in to her left eye with such power that it penetrated her brain.

  Jean fell to the floor lifeless. To make sure, Sean went to the kitchen sink and returned with a bread knife. He placed the tip of the knife against his mother's throat before putting his weight on it and forcing it through the flesh of her throat and into her upper spine.