The River Dark

by Nicholas Bennett

  "Me, too," he said, "at least- I think I am. After everything that has occurred today I'm not sure that okay quite covers it but I'm not one of them any way."

  O' Connell and Saunders exchanged glances. "So, you know about what's happening then?" Tom said.

  Collins nodded. "I've seen enough to realize that we're dealing with something… out of the ordinary."

  Tom snorted. "You can fucking well say that again!"

  "You'll have to bear with Tom, Mister Collins," O' Connell said resting his hand on Saunders' leather-jacketed arm. "He's been through rather a lot in the last day or two. At the-"

  "Shut up!" Saunders snapped but Collins made the connection.

  "Of course," he said quietly. "You were at the hospital when the riot took place, weren't you?"

  Tom eyes him coldly. "Thanks to you," he said.

  "Who was to know-?"

  "I wasn't part of that madness, Collins," he began stepping towards the policeman. The older man stepped back. "You have to believe me," Tom said, instantly dropping his voice again as he looked off to the sounds of gunfire in the distance, somewhat defeated.

  "I know," Collins said quietly.

  "I heard it all though," Tom continued. "I think I'll hear the screams in my dreams until the day I die." And unless we get out of the middle of the street, Collins thought, that day may come sooner than you think.

  "I was there afterwards and saw what they did," Collins said matter-of-factly.

  "Yes they not me," Tom said desperately. "I didn't have anything to do with any of that!"

  Collins watched awkwardly as the tall man began to cry. O' Connell put his arm around his friend and made comforting sounds. He looked bitterly at Collins. "There was someone waiting for him outside of his room when he went to leave," he said. "The mad fucker had an eyeball in his mouth." Collins nodded sympathetically and mentally logged the information. At least they could easily nail Julian Knight's killer when all of this was finally over. If any of this would ever end, he corrected.

  "I think we should get out of the street," he said. The two men followed him across the road and into the alleyway that led to

  Busted Lane, the northern most road off Cornhill. The three men walked purposefully, each of them scanning the dark places ahead for movement.

  "What were you two doing any way?" Collins asked.

  "We were heading this way- well, actually we had to take a roundabout way to get to Tom's girlfriend's place. She's- er- incommunicado, we think-"

  "She's one of them now," Tom muttered.

  "You don't know that, mate, do you?"

  Saunders kicked at a stone and said nothing. John-o returned his attention to Collins.

  "There's some kind of fucking war going on down by the river so we had to take the long route. We were listening to the shooting when you came along."

  "Who is it?"

  "The army," Tom said shortly.

  "Oh, right," Collins said. Somewhat confused, he asked: "Who are they fighting?"

  "The army," Tom said again. "They're mowing each other down."

  *

  3

  The well at the back of the museum is obviously an entrance to the tunnels but it is blocked off – has been for centuries apparently- with criss-crossed wrought iron bars. Why would they have done that? The well lies in what was obviously the courtyard of the Abbey and the museum itself was some sort of house separate from the structure as a whole. The best I have managed to do is shine a torch down the well but there is no way of ascertaining its depth. Hartley, the curator, does not want me nosing around for some reason.

  What is it with him? He obviously feels that part of his role is to make discovery and illumination as difficult as possible. When I took my year 9's there last year, the obvious questions were asked about the well; the children were fascinated by its mysteries. How deep is it? Has anyone ever been down there? And ironically- given my own interests- do you think that it leads to secret tunnels? Why not have something to tell them that would arouse their interest? This is their town! This is their history! Instead, I had to try to kindle a spark of enthusiasm among them talking about rusty old agricultural artifacts. Hartley- the skinny old goat- puts me in the mind of the Egyptian authorities in charge at the Pyramids. Everything that you read about the excavations at Giza is tinged with frustration as a result of the bureaucratic impediments thrown in the way. Of course, it all adds to the mystery, doesn't it? It makes people want it more.

  This is hardly the same thing, though. But who knows what is down there? I keep re-reading the Wesley document and, each time I do, I ask myself the same old question: what did Wesley have to gain by writing of these hidden artifacts? The classic rule of examining secondary sources applies, of course. No secondary source can be entirely trusted as a result of the likelihood that the author has a bias or distorted viewpoint. Even the most- ostensibly – objective piece of writing is tinged with viewpoint or interpretation but- again- what would have been Wesley's motive? When he wrote his entries, they were not for public consumption. He had no vested interests in attracting any sort of investment to the town. Tourism was non-existent back then too. Only the wealthy and/or adventurous could tour the countryside as he had done. Minstrels accepted.

  Wesley:

  "Measton (known name of town up until the late 17th century) has many charms, none the least of which is the remains of the old Abbey, ransacked (?) by Henry VIII in 1539. Its noble remains are scattered among the fields to the north of the river like gravestones in a village cemetery."

  He goes on to refer to the lost treasures of the abbey which ties in with many of the things that you hear here- even among the children. They talk of the so-called Hidden Bell of Measton. The basic story runs- prior to the dissembling of the monastery, the monks and abbots removed the bell from the original bell tower- apparently dwarfing the one that looks out over the town today- and hid it. How they hid it of course is another question but the point is when the soldiers came they destroyed the abbey. Why destroy something so precious, so beautiful? Henry VIII- despite schoolboy ideas- did not want to loot and destroy the Church. So why such devastation? Without machinery, it must have taken months to pull down. Unless, of course, they were looking for something special…

  If something of that size were to be hidden, where could it be? The answer, according to folklore, is clearly under the abbey ruins, in the mysterious tunnels.

  Again, the tunnels.

  They obviously exist.

  Possible entrances:

  1. The underwater entrance downstream from the weir.

  2. The well at the museum.

  3. Somewhere in the meadows to the east of the ruins?

  The thing that drives my curiosity is the deliberate way in which the tunnels have been forgotten. For me it sums up the lethargy of this town. How could you rest knowing that such ancient mystery lies beneath your feet?

  3

  The power was holding out- for now- and that was something. Weaver tossed Davies' strangely dull diary onto the floor in front of him and looked at Mary once again. A vile shade of purple had crept below her hairline as the bruising had spread and the shape of her head was distorted by the swelling in her hair; it was an angry colour in absolute contrast to the paleness of her forehead. He lifted the makeshift ice pack (that Collins had made with packets of frozen vegetables and a tea towel) to the offending area and held it there until an icy droplet rolled out of Mary's hair. He caressed it away with his thumb. Despite her condition, she looked peaceful enough and, in repose, she was beautiful to Weaver's eyes. He shook his head in denial. It shouldn't be so easy to fall for this woman; there was too much between them. She even looked like Grant in the pixy cheekbones and Peter Pan slant to her long lashed eyelids. He brushed her hair away from the discolouration once more. There was a dent in the centre of the swelling that had bled briefly. He leaned over her face close enough to smell her hair. Come on, Mary, he whispered in her ear, come back to me. But wh
o was to say that when she did return she would be Mary at all? They knew little enough about this river madness- or whatever it was- to have a lack of faith in Mary's return to sanity upon regaining consciousness. If she regained consciousness at all, Weaver thought and started at a creaking floorboard.

  There was nothing there. Davies was the only other presence in the house and he lay in the attic dead. Dead among his obsessions.

  It was clear that he was obsessed. All of that mushy history and hearsay about tunnels and treasures secretly buried in mysterious places beneath the Abbey ruins seemed like a load of bullshit and hot air to Weaver. Conspiracy cover-ups to hide the truth et cetera. Such paranoid theories were often the product of an under-stimulated mind, Weaver had always thought. He thought of Paul and his conviction that an announcement regarding the existence- more than that- the dominance of an alien master race- was imminent. The spate of alien obsessed films and television serials was preparation apparently. Even in Weaver's most stoned periods, when he had existed in that foggy armchair world of dope circles, experiencing off-kilter perception and paranoia to the nth degree, he had maintained a healthy cynicism regarding Paul's "well-supported" (if you wanted to call David Icke a watertight reference, that was) ideas about the fact that the human race was simply an experiment and the CIA knew all about it. Et cetera.

  Weaver picked up Davies' notebook again and thumbed through the pages. He looked at Mary's seemingly sleeping form and frowned. But why all of the cynicism? Hadn't the events of the last few days alone been enough to open his mind to some extent? Maybe that was the problem. He thought about Nirvana mark IV gathering dust in Paul's studio. His block- for want of a better word- was perhaps a result of his inability to open his mind to the otherness of existence, the possibilities. How could he take on such an esoteric project with such narrow perceptions? Perhaps that was why he was so comfortable with Hippy. The caricature was a tongue in cheek poke at the "we want to believe" generation that fitted in comfortably with Weaver's stance in the world. A man that was happy to live among the self-styled avant-garde as long as he could take the piss out of it all, as long as he could place the weird and wonderful in that folder marked Unexplained Bullshit and shut it away so that he didn't have to think about what else that draw contained. He saw the faceless figure, reaching up out of the murk of greens and browns

  "I painted it," Weaver muttered. "It was always me."

  The vision he had experienced when Callaghan had tried to kill him seemed to confirm that much.

  But it hadn't born the hallmarks of his style. Where the painting of the muddy figure was thickly smeared sworls and texture, Weaver would have obsessed over smooth lines and symmetry. Despite his crack to Collins that afternoon, he was not a messy artist; the opposite applied to his artwork in fact.

  But he could have done it. Weaver sighed and closed his eyes. In the distance he heard the rotating blades of a helicopter and what he recognized to be a distorted voice amplified though a PA system. He opened his eyes again. He looked at the blank screen of the television and on impulse decided to see if any of this was being covered by the news. The television signal was down. The weather, surely the weather, he thought. Well what else could it be, Weave? His inner voice had taken on Paul's persona for some reason. The voice of the ultra-open mind. It couldn't possibly be anything else, could it? I mean- these crazies running around killing people wouldn't try to cut communications with the outside world would they? Point taken. Let's play "what if" for a moment, shall we? What if this river madness is something real, something that has always been there waiting for a trigger, the right set of circumstances, and a catalyst to set the wheels into motion? After all, it doesn't take much for Man to start behaving true to his nature does it? War, fear, bigotry- all of them linked to that nasty little piece of darkness waiting to be fed and magnified, sucking up the media spin like carrion picking the flesh off the bones of the carcass of society- a society that, in case you hadn't noticed, no longer seems to conform to any set moral code. What if there is more to life than your neat lines and symmetry? What if you painted that figure- possibly your most original piece- in a state of unconsciousness that allowed you to let go? An unconscious state that allowed you to reveal your true self?

  Weaver opened the notebook once more. At random he found a hand drawn map.

  He examined it with amusement; it was childish beyond belief but illustrated perfectly Davies' obsession. It was the product of a mind that wanted to know what lay beneath the surface of such simplicity. To confirm this, he had written beneath the map:

  There will be a map soon enough of what lies beneath the mediocre streets of Measton that will put the smoky little place well and truly on the map of this country. Again, I cannot understand why the people of this town have lived with the monks' mysteries below their daily routines for so long and allowed them to remain just that: mysteries. That so many generations have lived and died without questioning the otherness of their town leaves me cold. It shows the absolute lack of depth to the people here. It's a shame really. The children of this town are as inquisitive as anywhere else but- as in many small towns- convention and expectation moulds them into the slack-jawed, narrow-mindedness of their parents. It isn't long before any interesting thought processes are over-ridden by the overwhelming concern that is: "What's on tele tonight?"

  Nice guy, Weaver thought with more than a trace of irony and tried to reconcile the intelligence- albeit, rather superior in attitude- displayed within these pages with the animal above in the attic but could not. Granted, the language of the piece smacked of bitterness, perhaps even arrogance, but nothing of the insanity that would follow. To write something along the lines of soon enough my day will come is undoubtedly the work of a bit of a prat but who was it for any way? Davies was a loner, a self-contained man. If these were his thoughts or his way of passing the time in between weight lifting and polishing his kitchen utensils, fair enough. It was better than the kiddy porn he had feared to find, given Harry Collins' profile of the man, let alone the bizarre revelation to his students prior to his supposed catatonia.

  Why isn't this being explored? Davies seemed appalled by the apparent lack of ambition in Measton; Weaver flicked through the pages once more and glanced at Mary. He wasn't surprised in the least. Davies had arrived in the town in his early twenties, not long after Weaver had left. Davies was in the process of discovering one of the reasons why Weaver had chosen to leave what many outsiders believed to be an idyllic little town in one of the most beautiful regions in England. There was a saying in town, no- that was wrong- it wasn't even a saying, more of a tagline to mark the immutability of the town and its people: always had been, would be always. To some it was a quaint characteristic of the place that went along the same lines as the supposedly stubborn forthrightness of a Yorkshireman but Weaver had grown up with it and had grown to hate that particular attitude from the very core of his being. He could never- still couldn't- understand how obduracy could be counted as a quality. He remembered well the predictable looks he’d received when he had taken Art and Design at further and then higher education. By the time he had chosen to leave the town and go to the "gay capital" of England to concentrate on his artwork, he may as well have announced his retirement from the world of Men too according to the unwritten Measton Book of Maledom. For some reason he had felt that he was frowned upon for choosing to leave a town- where even after more than a decade of years away, the same backsides (although larger now) occupied the same stools in the same pubs- in order to pursue his dreams. His contemporaries only seemed to moan about the place any way.

  The fact remained: he had chosen to leave.

  He considered Mary and thought it strange that he was such a stranger in the town that he had occupied throughout his youth. Whenever he returned, people that he had not known during his formative years asked him where he was from and looked surprised when the answer they received was here. Leaving was never the easier option though. His prem
aturely middle-aged peers believed that it was a "cop out" to turn your back on your childhood places but that was simply not true. It wasn’t easy to go against convention, to ignore the expected steps of school, girl, wife, house, wife-and-child, material overload and its various add-ons in pursuit of a dream.

  But was it the pursuit of a dream or, rather, the escape from a nightmare? Weaver wasn't sure.

  Robert Frost had written of choosing the path less trodden and that he commented had made all the difference. Weaver had to agree. He had loved that old metaphorical verse but the thing about the poem that had always stayed with him, like an old friend giving comfort in times of self-doubt, was the idea that, as way leads on to way, whatever your intentions may have been at the time, you could never return to the point of departure once you had made your choice. Even if you managed to get back to that point somehow, you’d changed enough to render the experience different enough to remove it from the original concept. He’d experienced the same phenomena when painting. The difficulty of putting your vision onto canvas was trying enough but changing your mind and attempting to revive an earlier, alternative idea could be damn near impossible. In life, he regarded the faces in the pubs of Measton as unchanged because of the context in which he saw them and the way they had grown into the expected attitude of the Measton male. A part of him was glad that he was not one of them but- increasingly with the passing years- part of him mourned his heritage, the sense that he no longer belonged to a tribe and, as Frost said, you couldn't go back to that place where the road forked and you had made your telling choice. The fact that Frost had perceived it so well, helped Weaver a great deal but it didn't completely heal that sense of drifting. Many people undoubtedly felt the same-