The River Dark

by Nicholas Bennett

  Whatever you do don let em in. I seen wh they do when they scream.

  What do they do?

  She had read Jack's reply as she heard her step-father roar in pain.

  Possess you or kill you.

  How do you know? Claire had replied.

  Coz my dad is one of em now. He kill my mom.

  Claire shook her head in disbelief but what was there to doubt? Measton had gone bad. The deaths leading up to the nights of chaos and madness had only been the beginning. Earlier they had watched the flashes of gunfire at Ross's from their bedroom windows.

  R U OK? Claire winced as she pressed Send but what else could she say? What was she supposed to do? Send him a sad smiley?

  Her phone vibrated in her hand and she opened Jack's reply.

  Y. Hiding from dad in attic wiv my brother. We think he's gone out. I'm going to check as soon as I can get kevin to stay here on his own. He's scared of the dark and don't get wots happening.

  Kevin was only five she remembered.

  B careful, she typed and then, as an after thought, added an x. She pressed Send and waited. The phone vibrated; the message read simply:

  K. Thanx. X.

  The continual thudding from her parents' room had ceased. She heard heavy footsteps outside her room and then the handle rattled. She leaned with all of her weight against the bed, wishing that her stepfather would go away, dreading to think what he had done to her mother. The handle rattled again and she felt a force pushing against the door even though there was a dresser and a cast iron framed bed between them. She put her trainered feet onto the wall to give her greater traction and pushed back with all of her strength. She heard an animalistic snarl from the hallway and something- a fist she thought- slammed into the door- hard enough to splinter the paint on this side of the door. Her heart beat hard in her chest as she waited for whatever would come next. Instead she heard the heavy footfalls retreating until the thud-thud-thud of feet on the carpeted stairs.

  She breathed a sigh of relief and her phone buzzed. Jack.

  Goin now. Laterz. X.

  Claire squeezed her eyes shut against tears. She knew that she should go and see her mother but was too scared to move. Inaminuteinaminuteinaminute she thought and breathed hard. Downstairs the front door opened. She heard his footsteps scraping through the gravel footpath he had created last summer; she had brought him a beer and listened to him chat aimlessly to their neighbour, George Billingsway, enjoying the sun on her shoulders and legs. It had been a good day. A day that had taken place in a different universe far removed from this one. Claire sat on the edge of her pink quilted bed and prepared herself to go and see her broken mother.

  All over Measton untouched children mourned parents, unaffected parents mourned children and innocent spouses mourned each other. The survivors were either the hunters or the hunted; the darkness continued to spread.

  *

  5

  The room had filled with insidious whispers. The creature that had been Andrew Davies held the blade an inch from Weaver's eye. His humanity had been stripped away. His hair had fallen out in clumps and his skin had taken on a jaundiced hue; the skin around his elbows had been rubbed raw, almost to the bone. The fingers that held the knife were black with a viscous substance that could only have been blood. The base of its skull bore the bruise of the blow that Weaver had been sure would have killed it. A brown residue covered his teeth and ran from the corners of the mouth that released the voices.

  Tom Saunders had already succumbed to the whispers; he heard a litany of hatred towards those that had repressed him and been a cancer to his creativity. John O'Connell had lurid images swirling through his mind depicting the endless Dante-esque hell of possibilities of sexual congress with women of all shapes and sizes and of all ages in a lawless world. In his semi-conscious state, Collins imagined that he was inside an enormous beehive with thousands of identical workers buzzing around their Queen. Words occasionally emanated from their wings but he would drift into his own darkness before he could make any of any of it.

  "Don't listen to them!" Weaver screamed at the two men. The creature tightened its vice like grip around his windpipe causing him to gag.

  "Silence, my little friend, silence," a crooning male voice rose out of the sibilant noise and spoke into his ear. "You will have your time," it cooed and giggled before subsiding. Weaver could make out none of the other words. They were not meant for him. The voices had directed their attentions to John and Tom. He craned his neck and looked up into the gaping mouth of his captor. He smelt the vile corruption of its breath and turned away. He looked at the two men, men he had known from childhood and sent out all of his effort of will at them. Both men stared vacantly at the creature. A line of drool rolled over John-o's bottom lip. Collins grunted in his fugue and looked ready to stir, whatever use he would be with his gunshot wound. There was a sound in the hallway behind them and the lounge door opened.

  The creature shifted slightly allowing Weaver to see the new arrivals. Their boots and camouflage gear indicated what they had been before that night; their expressions, uncannily similar to those on the faces of Tom and John, left no doubt of what they were now. One of the soldiers laid his gun against the wall as he adopted the pose that David Weaver had first seen when Eric Callaghan had stood at the foot of Sarah's bed, allowing the voices to flow through them.

  The hissing intensified.

  Movement to his left caused him to look at the unconscious form on the couch. Mary seemed to be…rippling. Weaver blinked several times. Something was happening to her. Weaver blinked again. Mary looked more there, more substantial. The creature swung him away from her and dragged him in to the hallway. It was dark out there but the creature knew where it was going. It kicked open the front door with a filthy bare foot and pushed him out into the drizzling night.

  *

  6

  Heaney paced the hallway carpet outside his son's room and waited for the priest to come out of the bathroom. He heard the toilet flush followed by the sound of a tap running. The priest opened the door and stepped into the hallway. Heaney hardly drew back his fist but the force of the punch to the holy man's midriff caused the priest to double up. Heaney brought his knee up into the man's face and watched with no satisfaction at all as the priest fell onto his back, blood gushing from his nose. Heaney reached down and took the priest by his white collar and drew back his right fist.

  "What the fuck have you done to my son, you bastard?" Heaney spat into the other man's face. He heard hurried feet on the stairs and Maureen threw herself onto his arm.

  "John-John!" She screamed. "No! What in God's name are you doing?"

  The policeman rounded on his wife. "God's name? God's name?" Heaney ranted his breath coming in great gulps. "This fucking charlatan has as much God in him as-"

  "No, John, no!" Maureen took his face in her hands. "You have to calm down."

  "But look at what he's done woman!"

  "It wasn't him, John. Think now! You know that it wasn't him." Heaney looked at O'Brien who had forced himself up against the wall and was trying to stem his bloody nose with a handkerchief. O' Brien looked at him and nodded in agreement with Maureen somehow managing to look sympathetic even in his undignified state.

  "You want someone to blame, John, I know you do," she soothed. Heaney felt the anger leaving his body and slumped to the floor. Maureen knelt by him and took his head in her arms. "It's natural to want to blame someone but Father O'Brien isn't to blame, is he?"

  Heaney buried his face in the downy material of his ex-wife's jumper and smelt her familiar clean, warm scent; it was an aroma that he knew so well and something that he had foolishly given up for another woman along with a life that, although he had never told her, she knew that he had cherished and now mourned with an accompanying self-hatred that only he could generate. He was his own judge. The truth of the matter was simple. As John Heaney took comfort from the woman he had betrayed and mourned the sons he had
abandoned, the only person that he really blamed was himself. Maureen stroked his hair.

  "Why don't you get out there and try to find out what's causing this evil," she whispered. "We need men like you out there, John. Go and find Collins and kill whatever it is that is taking our children."

  Heaney looked up at his wife and saw that she believed in what she had said. She believed that there was a culprit, a being that could be conquered, that good could triumph over evil. She believed that the evil force that had stolen their children could be killed suggesting that it had a life force beyond that of the darkness in men's souls. He only wished that he believed that to be the case. O'Brien stood up.

  "I'm sorry Father," Heaney said. "I don't know what came over me."

  "Think nothing of it, John," O'Brien returned. "But I think that your wife's words make sense. You should be out there trying to find some answers to whatever is causing all of this."

  Heaney nodded and kissed his wife on the cheek noting that for the first time in the years since he had told her of his affair with Jayne Miles, she did not stiffen or edge away from him.

  Heaney pulled his mobile phone out of his jacket pocket and headed for the door. He stopped and turned back to where the priest stood looking at his ex-wife. "He said that we were fighting against ourselves, Father. What do you think he meant by that?"

  O'Brien smiled weakly. "There is nothing new in that now, is there John? Aren't we always the architects of our own downfall? Isn't that the essence of the struggle against sin?"

  Heaney left the house.

  *

  7

  Mary looked up at the ceiling. She could still feel the imprint of the shadow boy's hands in the small of her back. All around her there were whispers. She blinked again and saw two men rocking back and forward in the middle of the room. In the reflection of the television screen she could make out the reflections of the screamers. By more than instinct she knew that she should not move; the shadow seemed to hold her back where moments before it had thrust her forward into the room, into her own body. Something was about to happen.

  A ringing sound to her left cut through the whispers; in the reflection of the television she saw the soldiers look at each other in confusion. Then the shadow stepped inside her.

  Collins opened his eyes and saw a woman rise before him and sweep an arm across his vision before snapping something back to her face with liquid grace. He heard two deafening bangs and then the woman stood over him saying something. He felt the world waver again but still he could hear the ringing. It followed him down into the darkness.

  "It's okay. You'll be alright now," Mary's voice said but they were not her words. She shook her head and felt the shadow leave her. She was alone once more.

  Mary looked at the rifle in her hands and at the dead soldiers at her feet. She had no idea how she had killed them. She had a vague recollection of the shadow entering her body and then movement. The rest was confused. She had never even held a gun, let alone shot one. The ringing stopped and she saw that the man had lost consciousness again. It was then that she recognized him. Collins. The detective.

  She swung around then, half-expecting the other men to be lurching at her but they were not. One of them, the taller who she knew as Tom, had sat on the couch with his head in his hands; the other, who she saw was John-o, had fallen to his knees. He looked up at her in confusion as though he had no idea where he was or how he had got there.

  "Are you-er-you?" Mary said to him.

  He nodded. "Yeh, I think so. But I think that I came as close as you're ever going to get to being one of those- you know-" John-o bent forward and vomited noisily. Tom looked up at her and said:

  "It lives off our darkness. You know?" He shuddered and put his hands to the side of his head. "I can still hear those voices. Like an echo."

  Mary nodded. "I know. I've been one of them."

  John-o wiped his mouth and looked up startled, his eyes all fear. "Then how-?"

  "I don't know," she said. "No, that's not true," she corrected. "I do know but I don't know how to put it into words. Someone helped me."

  Both men looked at her in confusion.

  Mary smiled. "Did you know my brother? When you were children?"

  She could see in their eyes that they knew who she was referring to and nodded gently. She turned back to Collins. "We need to stem this blood flow," she said. "Go and see what you can find: bandages, cloths or something. And something that we can wrap really tightly around his shoulder. Parcel tape, anything."

  Neither man moved. "Come on!" Mary snapped. That got them moving. Five minutes later, Collins was bandaged to Mary's satisfaction.