The River Dark

by Nicholas Bennett

  He saw that concerned face looking into his, a face that seemed to have spanned his life.

  Davey's eyes flickered.

  "That's it, son," soothed a faraway voice. "Come back to us. Come on."

  "Weaver. David. Come on," the voice whispered. "We have to get out of here now!"

  Collins looked into his face, concern and fear instantly obvious despite Weaver's battered senses.

  "They've shifted their focus," the policeman said. "It's Heaney they want now." Weaver frowned and shook his head in confusion until he realized the truth of what Collins had told him. The voices had redirected. He was no longer under attack. Collins eyes flicked to the left and he reached over Weaver's foetal form. With a teeth-jarring rattle, he pulled the cleaver towards him. He examined the lethal edge of the blade, coagulated blood inches from his face.

  "We might need this," he said matter-of-factly and helped Weaver to his feet.

  "Where are we going?" Weaver managed. He was finding it difficult to think straight, to form basic sentences. They hurt me, he thought and with that came the certainty that- after such an onslaught- he would never be the same again. He felt dampness on his upper lip and touched the fingertips of his right hand to the moisture and examined the sticky residue of his own blood; it was flowing freely. My brain has been dissolved, he thought and sniggered.

  Collins shot a meaningful look at Weaver and said: "We're going in there-" he pointed at the door in the cavern wall- "we're going after John Heaney and his boy."

  *

  8

  As the void revealed its secrets, Heaney struggled to comprehend what he saw. Layers of depravity suggested themselves to his mind and were refused entry. Heaney was a choir boy before the Devil. The tempest of images resolved to reveal cloaked figures surrounding a young boy. Imagery of sacrifice was indelibly etched onto his psyche by virtue of his Catholic upbringing but nothing quite like this; one of them drew out the shining line of blade. A boy was strapped to the altar, the accoutrements of Christianity long ago swept to the side and lying in the corners of the chamber, unwanted and forgotten.

  This was the new religion. All flesh was grass, after all. Hooded figure with the knife roughly slashed at the peasant boy's robes until his nakedness was revealed.

  A squat figure staggered to the altar, sobbing with desire, the hood falling away from a pink, bald head which fell greedily onto the boy. The others laughed and allowed the fat abbot his moment of pleasure. On the altar, the boy groaned in shameful disgust.

  The blade flashed across the boy's neck and a geyser of blood arced into the darkness

  and splashed on to the oblivious monk's neck as ravished the boy’s torso. Again the dark gathering laughed at the spectacle. The boy twitched on the altar and was dead.

  Appalled, hitherto stunned into silence, Heaney staggered through the chamber towards the cloaked murderers but the room dissolved and span with the velocity of water spiraling away into the sewers; the black cloaks became shadows, a blur of inky movement and then there was only the altar and the gangling creature that had once been a man but now, stripped of its humanity, it stared at him through lidless eyes. The flesh of its torso had wasted away exposing every ripple of bone beneath the tired parchment of its skin, even the muscle tone had diminished leaving only a sagging, old man's belly, filth etched into the creases. From long years in the darkness, it was blind.

  Heaney overcame his revulsion and took a step towards the altar. The yellow head flicked back and the mouth dropped open with a viscous slop; a high pitched whine cut through the oppressive air causing Heaney to reach for his ears in spite of himself but it was a pointless gesture. The frequency did not touch his ears. Instead it attempted to penetrate his brain. He shook his head in fury.

  "Where the fuck is my son, you piece of shit?" The high pitched drone stopped abruptly.

  There was a momentary beat.

  The creature sailed over the altar its limbs held before it like a Praying Mantis. Before Heaney had time to move, it was upon him. He fell back onto the stonework as the creature planted a bony knee in the centre of his chest and peered into his face with sightless eyes. It can see me, Heaney thought, despite the fact that he could see things- living things crawling across its black pupils.

  But that was not the worse.

  The smell of the creature at close quarters was beyond anything he had ever experienced including the smell of corpses left to fester for days on end in closed houses during August, including the rotting limb of an elderly woman with severe dementia having neglected her diabetes for long enough to become a gangrenous human sore. Heaney turned his head to one side and gagged, hot bile spilling onto his shoulder. The creature leaned forward until its mouth was inches from his own.

  "Here's your son," it rasped and the world grew dim. It opened its foul mouth and Heaney saw

  three

  boys in

  a

  boat.

  He saw the bleached arms of the woman as she gained purchase and saw his youngest boy faint with fear. Paul fell back against his unconscious brother and put his thumb in his mouth, an affectation he hadn’t demonstrated since infancy. Heaney stood on the shore watching them. He tried to call to them but he had no voice. He tried to move towards them but his feet were fixed into the ground. He screamed inwardly as he watched the river woman clamber into the boat causing it to rock dramatically.

  Andrew slipped into the water; his eyes were closed and his mouth was open. In his vision he was treated to an overhead angle in which he could see clearly his son's descent into the vague waters, air escaping his lungs in gassy gurgles on the surface until there was no more to escape. Heaney looked into the darkness

  of

  the

  creature's mouth as it moved towards his throat. He felt little pain as the creature's teeth, honed to points over the years, punctured his flesh and sank in; the pain of his son's drowning- a sight he had been afforded as a result of the fact that he was in Hell- far outweighed anything that the creature could inflict. Please God, Heaney thought, as the stinking head shuddered with the ecstasy of the warm blood in its throat.

  Let Paul be alright. Don't allow him to die for the sins of his father. Forgive me my sins. Let my wife live in peace. Please. My boy. Paul. Into your hands I commend my-

  *

  9

  John-o followed the woman into the hillside and asked himself just what the fuck he thought he was doing for what seemed like the millionth time. Despite the narrow escape she'd had, the fact that she had lain there on the bridge with death upon her and water in her lungs, still she insisted that they pursue the monsters to their lair.

  Fucking madness.

  The only difference being that now she had a place to go. She had brought back a complete set of directions to the tunnels from wherever her mind had gone as he had frantically pumped at her chest and breathed into her mouth, calling upon every medical drama he had ever watched to guide him. There was another way in, she said. When asked how she knew this new and rather vital piece of information, she had smiled and told him that a witch had told her. Oh, right. Of course. That'll be the witch that lives in the forest with the fairies and the

  harlequin

  wizards, he’d replied.

  "Haven't you been through enough to allow you to open your mind a little?" Mary had asked him gently as they looked into the rent in the hillside. It was a narrow opening that he could not have found in a thousand years, let alone in the darkness and under the cover of the canopy afforded by the cedar trees. "Haven't we all seen enough to allow us to see past the old rules?"

  "I preferred you when you were selling copies of Men Only to dirty old men," John-o replied but knew that what she had said was true. Old habits die hard though. The woodsman; the warning; the voices he had heard; all of the insanity of the past few nights; the metamorphosis of some of the missing into a cross between Nosferatu and Gollum; all of it was meaningless in the face of some good old stubb
orn sorry, it's all bollocks cynicism. Cynicism was like a security blanket. The question was: do you burn it in one go- or wean yourself off it a day at a time? For them, there had been no choice. Jesus. Only a few hours before, he had been watching a quiz show and wondering whether he would enjoy fucking the delightful hostess with the mostess. Now they were about to enter a crack in the world to confront God only knew what insanities in the tunnels beneath Measton.

  Mary knelt before the chasm and peered into the nothingness. It was a piece of blackness, darker than anything he had ever seen. I don't want to go in there, he thought. It occurred to John-o that this entrance into the tunnels would have been common knowledge. Someone had to have known about it; how had it gone unnoticed for- how old was the Abbey? - five, six hundred years?

  The rain had turned the meadow into a bog and they were both exhausted from the effort of climbing the incline to this hidden place. Mary paused momentarily, breathing hard. Her ribs ached dully from John-o's CPR. God knew she would be sore tomorrow, if indeed there was to be a tomorrow she thought. John-o shone his flashlight into the grassy chasm. The dog bared its teeth at them and growled menacingly.

  "Fuck!" John-o jumped back and lost his footing on the bog-like surface. He put out one hand to break his fall. Mary helped him to his feet.

  "German Shepherd," she said.

  "Yeah and not overly friendly. I wonder who left it there. Does this madness affect dogs too?"

  Mary shook her head. "I don't know but this is obviously deliberate. Whoever left the dog there knew that this was a way in."

  "How could anyone know that this was here?" John-o muttered.

  "How did I know?" Mary replied. "The point is- what are we going to do about that dog?" John-o eyed the rifle warily. He shook his head.

  "I can't shoot it," he said. "Don't ask me to." Mary unstrapped the rifle.

  "Just shine the light into the hole," she said. In the torchlight her eyes were wide. John-o felt like a coward; it was the traffic lights at

  Bridge Street all over again. Look what had happened then. She almost died- had died, in fact.

  "Fuck it," he said. "Give me the gun." Mary handed him the rifle and took the torch. The dog showed its incisors, its ears back. Its haunches moving from side to side, as though preparing to leap out of the hole at them. His finger touched the trigger and he saw the deer lying on the side of the road out in the countryside, eyes wide with fear, snorting with pain. He remembered clearly the way his friend's face had looked up at him moments before he had ended its life with a baseball bat. He shuddered. Someone just walked over your grave, they said, didn't they? Tom. Something bad had happened. The dog's guttural snarl began to rise.

  "Do it now," Mary whispered. John-o turned away from the hole.

  "Something's happened to Tom," he told her.

  The dog pounced out of the earth.

  *

  10

  The creature savaged the dead man, its head quivering as it feasted on the soft flesh of his throat. Collins uttered a cry of revulsion that alerted the creature to his presence. It pulled away from Heaney and turned towards the doorway. Collins noted the glassy vacant stare of death in his friend's eyes and nodded grimly. At least the Irishman was out of his misery despite the gore below his jaw line; he seemed to look upon a better place than this charnel hell hole. The remains of generations of corpses littered the room in varying degrees of decomposition, some half-leaning against what must have been an altar in the past. He saw the wispy remnants of artificially coloured hair clinging to the dried scalp of a woman, her tie-dyed dress covered in cobwebs and dust but otherwise intact. His mental case notes flicked away until the face of an unsolved mystery stared back up at him. Janice Stephens.

  The creature got to its feet and Collins noticed its weariness. It was, after all, human and subject to exhaustion and starvation, insane strength and durability aside. Its limbs were covered in the filth of the river and sticky residue of Heaney's lifeblood. . It opened its mouth and the whispers began to prod at Collins' psyche.

  "Don't bother," Collins said matter-of-factly and began to walk towards the lanky figure, his arms at his sides. "I've seen it all. There's nothing that you can show me that will either shock me or tempt me. There is no darkness in here that I have not already confronted."

  It was little Davey Weaver that viewed the scene from the doorway. Collins strode into the inner chamber towards the creature, talking to it, sounding unafraid. Davey was terrified; he was a child again, waiting for the policeman to take him home. He wanted to tell the policeman to come back so they could run away but his mouth trembled but would allow no words to pass.

  The creature eyed the man with contempt. "If you won't join us, you will die," it said with ravaged vocal chords. It lunged at Collins, hands reaching for his neck. Weaver screamed. Collins brought the cleaver up in a powerful arc and buried it in between the creature's ribs several inches below its armpit. The momentum threw the creature against the altar. It screamed in rasping whispering voices as it struggled to regain its feet. Collins lifted a boot and brought down on the side of its head. The creature slumped on the step beneath the altar, disturbing the remains of Janice Stephens, causing her to slide onto her side as though finally realizing that she was dead. Collins reached down and Weaver thought he was going to help the creature to its feet until the policeman pulled the knife out of its side. Weaver watched transfixed as Collins lifted the butcher's tool high above his head, pausing as the pain in his bullet-wounded shoulder caused him to wince, before burying it in the creature's skull.

  Collins stood up straight rubbing at his shoulder again. He went over to Heaney, shaking his head. A distant crack echoed into the chamber. Gunshot, he thought dimly.

  "Rest in peace," he said quietly and took off his coat. He laid it over Heaney gently and closed his eyes. For a moment his resolve wavered. Too much had happened; nothing would ever be right again; nothing could ever be the same. He felt the moisture seeping through his clothing and knew that he was losing blood. Blood. The world shifted as nausea gripped him. He looked down on the creature that had once been human- the handle of the knife sticking out of the top of its head like a Halloween fancy dress hat and his stomach lurched. He felt his gorge rise and let it come, vomit spilling onto the old flagstones, inches from the creature's bare and bloody feet. He wiped his mouth and turned back to the door, an apology that Weaver had seen such atrocity forming on his lips but Weaver was on the floor.

  The gunshot.

  Momentary panic filled his already exhausted body and mind. He felt drained of adrenalin; he had nothing left to give. Collins knelt over him looking for signs of injury but there were none. Weaver had fainted.

  *

  Chapter Seventeen

  1

  Paul sat up.

  His mother looked up from her fitful doze. O' Brien continued to snore in the chair next to the bed. Paul looked at her with his father's eyes. Maureen was used to seeing John Heaney's face etched in their son's countenance but this was somehow different. She knew that it was her husband even before he spoke.

  "Maureen," his voice intoned through their son.

  She fell to her knees tears straining from the corners of her wrung out eyes. "John-"

  "Listen," the voice soothed. "I am sorry for everything that I ever did to hurt you. I was lost. Somewhere along the way, I lost the sense of who I was supposed to be and of who I truly loved."

  O' Brien had woken and crossed himself automatically.

  "Andrew is with me now and he is happy, Maureen. He is at peace."

  She realized the significance of what she was being told and began to cry. O'Brien rushed to her and held her tightly. In the distance, as though in a tunnel, the voice of a child singing Row your boat.

  "I love you Maureen," Heaney's fading voice said. "We both love you."

  The atmosphere in the room changed subtly as though a door had been quietly closed. Paul continued to look at his weeping mother. He
blinked three times.

  "Mum," Paul said. "Why are you crying?"

  Maureen fell on the boy, kissing him and looking into his face as though she had never seen it before. Paul looked confused. "I was lost," he whispered.

  "But now you're found," O'Brien said and put his palm on the boy's cheek. Paul looked up at him, his eyes set in dark hollows.

  "I heard your voice," he said. "I was lost in the dark but my dad came and saved me."

  "Shush now," Maureen said and began to rock her oldest son as she had not done since he was a toddler. "We need to rest."

  O'Brien stepped out of the room thinking that rest would not come easy to any of them, not that night or for many to come.

  *

  2

  Susan Callaghan surveyed the dark street below and waited. The Crescent had never seen so much night time activity. The girls had slept soundly through it all though- that was one blessing at least. David had disappeared the previous evening off on a mysterious errand and now, close to dawn, she began to worry. The inevitable self-recriminations followed the early stages of concern. Why hadn't she been more forceful? Why had she allowed him to go? Her dear sister's son, the talented one, the outsider. His belongings lay scattered at varying points about the lounge including the sketch pad that he had used to entertain the girls while she had been in hospital; the canvas leaned against the wall covered in an old dust cloth. She had studied the painting upon returning from hospital and frowned at the clumsiness of the composition.