The River Dark

by Nicholas Bennett

  David was more definite, more about detail. This odd figure, reaching out of the darkness it seemed, was not up to his usual standard at all. She had shivered at the look of it and placed it back against the wall so she did not have to look at it. It was more than that though. The very presence of the picture provoked discomfort; she didn't want it in the house and had almost asked him to take it to his car but had stopped for fear of sounding ridiculous. Silly. She was obviously still in shock over the attack, not to mention considerable physical pain. The feeling of strangeness was further enhanced by the people on the streets.

  As the beginning of daylight lit the distant sky, they were still there- pacing the street past the Crescent with deliberate steps. Many of them were ill-attired for the inclemency of the night; a cross section of the town's populace. Only the direction they took offered a unifying factor.

  There had been nothing on the news. Either side of the power cuts she had tried the TV and radio but the local channels reported nothing out of the ordinary. That in itself was out of kilter- she’d heard the helicopters overhead and their demand that a curfew be observed. The girls had both been on the chat rooms and had been reliably informed that there was a gun battle occurring down by the river; some had even claimed that their parents were attacking them. That had been the point when Susan had decided that enough was enough. She had ordered them to log off before any more nonsense could fill their heads; as if they hadn't enough to keep them having nightmares for the rest of their lives. Eric's descent into madness and eventual suicide would haunt them forever but they would heal. People had a way of going on. Some legacy, she thought and felt sick anger causing her heart to palpitate uncomfortably. Selfish bastard.

  This was no good. They had prescribed valium and despite her opposition to such drugs, she thought that perhaps tonight was the night to lay her ethics to one side in favour of a few hours sleep. She was caught between that resignation and the idea that perhaps she should see in the day.

  She could always sleep later; they were going nowhere.

  The rain had thinned to a stubborn squall and the early indications of the sky showed clear patches. Measton's night-time wanderers had also slowed to a trickle. Her mind turned to Jonathan Black.

  Poor Jonathan.

  Before the subsequent madness, the police had drawn the obvious conclusion that Eric had killed John. Susan was sure that was the case too. Who else would have wanted to do such a thing? She shook her head again and moved away from the window. It was a mistake to attempt to attach reason to any of this madness.

  Susan glanced at the picture again. It drew her; a part of her wanted to study that muddy figure once more. She wondered what had happened to her nephew, unable to shift the idea that something bad happened to him.

  Where are you, David?

  In her mind the painted man reached out of the mire.

  *

  3

  I've died twice, Mary thought as her hand brushed sticky cobweb. She didn’t even flinch as something skittered away in to the darkness of the tunnel so loudly in the pitch blackness outside of the halo of light afforded by the flashlight beam, the urge to run screaming back the way they had come would have once been overwhelming, previous fears and phobias giving her no other choice.

  But that was the old Mary. She’d seen corpses pulled from rivers, been abducted from her home in the black of night by a boy/man controlled by supernatural beings, shared a coal bunker with a corpse, been possessed by evil spirits, drowned by the living dead and experienced the torture, rape and murder of a young woman not unlike herself, a woman that had thrown herself to certain death over five hundred years before. She had been pulled back from the brink not once but twice. Spiders? Fuck 'em.

  "What the fuck was that?" John-o moaned. John O' Connell did not share Mary's fearlessness.

  "Something small enough to step on!" Mary snapped back. "How far do you think we've walked?"

  John-o looked at his watch. It had stopped at 3.48 around about the time he had gone into the water after Mary. It was difficult to say. In this place a minute felt like a week.

  "Half a kilometer?"

  Mary sighed. "Yeah. That's what I thought." She had started to fear that they were in the wrong area. Just because there were other entrances to the tunnels, it did not follow that they all led to the same place.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid!

  But she had been so sure. After the visions she’d shared with the peasant girl, what other way could there be to go? She’d found the entrance taken by the old priests with ease, thinking as they’d struggled up from the river bank that the girl's hovel must have been nearby, the hovel she had shared with her father until he had- graven- died. My little Welsh witch Madman Moran would have called her. She had long since learned to put her feelings at the front of the decision making process.

  But maybe this was different.

  After all, there was something else going on here, wasn't there? Something with far heavier supernatural influence than her occasional I know where you lost your earring intuitions.

  A terrifying thought occurred to her then. Could I still be under its control? There was a brief memory of the creeping presences in her mind, traveling through the tunnels of her subconscious like an icy wind February wind.

  "Maybe we should head back," John-o whispered behind her; he had sensed her doubts; she could hear the hope at the edge of his voice. The darkness seemed to close in, pushing back the circle of light. She began to feel afraid again. This was all wrong. They had made a mistake. They’d-

  No. Mary shook her head. "We're going the right way," she said. "Don't doubt it." She knew at that moment that the presences that existed at the rotten core of the town wanted them to feel discouraged- it preyed on their self-doubt. They were, after all, leeches feeding on the negative energy of the townspeople. By nurturing self-doubt and insecurity, fear and paranoia would lead to prejudice and hatred. "It wants to make us feel scared. More than that, it needs us to feel fear. Don't give in to it."

  "Righty-o then," John-o muttered. "I'll put the fact that we're in a black tunnel heading towards certain death to one side for a moment then." Mary smiled in the darkness. Despite his sarcasm, she knew that he was stirred by her words. The atmosphere in the tunnel had changed; the torch light seemed to penetrate further.

  Mary slipped on the damp surface and John-o grabbed her arm. "Thanks. We're heading downhill," she said.

  "We have been for a while," John-o said. "I don't know about you but I think we're getting closer to-"

  The shadow lunged at Mary knocking the torch out of her hand. It hit the floor and rolled down the slope. Mary hit John-o knocking the wind out of him. He went down and felt Mary's head smash into his upper lip. He could taste his own blood. The weight on his chest increased as the assailant bore down on Mary.

  In the tunnel, they were blind.

  John-o tried to rock from side to side to shift the suffocating weight off his torso but to no avail. A strangled wheeze came from above and he realized that it was Mary. He could feel jagged nails digging painfully into his clavicle and felt the hands at either side of Mary's neck. His fingers found the place over Mary's windpipe and touched the thumbs that pushed deep into her throat.

  Mary was being throttled.

  John-o gripped the wrists of the invisible attacker and pushed upwards with all of his strength. It was difficult. With the back of Mary's head, mashing his nose painfully and the weight pressing forcefully down upon them both. He clenched his teeth and pushed again.

  Despite the pain and air restriction, Mary could feel John's efforts to push the hands away from her throat. She placed her hands over his and pushed. The strength in the arms of the shadow was too great. It wasn't working. She felt panic rise within her as the pain in her windpipe increased. She thrashed wildly with her legs until her thigh made contact with the man's genitalia. He grunted and his grip weakened for a moment.

  John-o felt the man's weight shift
and pushed again, harder than before. He felt Mary do the same and the man fell back into the darkness. Mary rolled off him wheezing and coughing. John-o pushed himself up quickly and regained his feet. He saw the figure back away and step over the torch before receding into the darkness. The attacker's steps echoed into the distance and faded to nothing. John-o retrieved the torch and shone it on Mary's face. Even in the poor light, he could see the vicious finger marks around her throat. The sound of their laboured breathing filled the catacomb. She breathed in ragged gulps her hands on her knees.

  "Now shall we go back?" John-o asked. Mary shook her head. She tried to speak and coughed feeling as though she had broken glass in her throat. When her throat had cleared sufficiently she rasped:

  "We're close."

  "To what though?"

  Mary shook her head. John-o shone the torch into the darkness into which the strangler had retreated. A hollow breeze drifted from below. It grew until it no longer sounded like the wind.

  "What's that?" John-o said.

  "It's the voices," Mary said. "We're close to the source."

  John-o looked into the tunnel and stepped forward. Mary followed.

  *

  4

  The two men moved through the living statues, desperately avoiding physical contact like boys in a children's game. The statues had identical vacant stares, their mouths hanging open, their hands immobile and forgotten at their sides. Only the whisper of breathing filled the cavern. It reminded Collins of an Intensive Care Unit with the eerie whisper of life support machinery defiantly delaying mortality, making ghosts of the living. As he squeezed between an old man wearing a brown dressing gown and a young woman with curlers in her hair, he wondered grimly how long these vessels would be sustained because, when all was said and done, that was what these people were, wasn't it? They were mere vessels for transporting the evil of whatever had pulsed and grown in the darkness beneath the town, feeding off the sins of one generation to the next. He also wondered where the voices had gone.

  Weaver followed Collins as he threaded his way through the missing people. There were gaps in his memory. He could remember being pushed through the darkness to this place and had a vague impression of seeing these immobile strangers before but that was all until he had awoken as though from a deep sleep when Collins had pulled him off the floor in the doorway to the chamber. Shock. Even in his confusion, he clung to the word, too afraid to push off in the direction of any other explanation. I'm in shock.

  Or perhaps you've gone completely insane, a cheerful voice sounded in his mind. He recognized the voice: Paul. You are, in fact, still under heavy sedation following your streak through a trendy Brighton patisserie as a result of a mental breakdown. Tunnel realities man. Everything is only a subjective trip any way. Wake up tomorrow and you probably won't even be you, only a completely different person with all of that person's memories and experiences, the life that you led yesterday a dream that you always forget upon waking-

  Bullshit.

  Weaver saw the crowd with their mouths stretched in that open trap door fashion and remembered the bombardment of voices and images that had almost finished him. Vivid, lurid pictures swam out of the depths and he pushed them away. It had been like flicking through the pages of a history book documenting the evil of human existence, the only difference being the fact that each page contained virtual realizations of victim, perpetrator and witness, over and over again. Layer upon layer of human filth. The soil upon which civilization had been built.

  It had been too much to bear.

  Something had given way. He’d felt it collapse and then there had been nothing.

  So why was he still here? Where had all of that darkness gone?

  You're not here, Davey. You're in intensive care after almost drowning. You're only six years old, remember? You wait until your mummy finds out what you've been doing-

  Bullshit.

  Collins turned back to him and nodded to the left towards a tunnel entrance. That was the way out, he’d decided. Weaver nodded and followed the policeman's change of direction.

  It was the smell of corruption that caused Collins' gorge to rise. For the second time in a matter of minutes, he swayed on his feet and felt hot bile bite at the base of his throat. He desperately swallowed and turned his thoughts to David Weaver. The man was bearing up remarkably well considering what he had been through. Christ, they both were, there was no doubt about that. There had been a moment back there when Collins was convinced that the younger man had cracked. Something had changed. He had giggled like a madman causing shivers of panic to chase each other up the policeman's spine like errant children. But he’d come round. Collins looked around at him again and Weaver nodded an I'm alright gesture and Collins headed for the outer perimeter of the catatonic gathering. He was about to break through the last few when a ripple of life washed over the crowd and he felt consciousness re-enter the room.

  In unison, the vacant were once more occupied. Heads snapped in his direction. The final rows of the demented closed ranks on the two men. They were trapped.

  Their mouths dropped open as one.

  Collins heard voices echoing from the tunnel they had been heading towards but only briefly.

  The whispering had started again.

  *

  5

  Brighton

  Paul blinked in the lamplight and saw the familiar figure of David Weaver moving in the shadows of his part of the studio, in among the easels and canvases of his work.

  "Weave? Is that you, man?" He reached for his John Lennon glasses and put them on looking into the recesses of the studio. As always he’d got stoned and fallen asleep listening to music. It was still playing low on his old CD Tape player in amongst the clutter of Gandalfs and Frodos on his work table. It was some local band on the verge of making it singing about how love was alright no matter how you liked it. Very right-on Brighton, Weaver would have said. He swung his legs over the side of the settee, another relic from an abandoned squat and accidentally allowed his faithful blanket to slide on to the floor. He stood up and stretched.

  He tossed the blanket back on to his makeshift bed and headed through the doorway into Weaver's work area. "Weave!” Paul called in to the darkness. “What are you up to?” No response. “Stop fucking about!" He flicked the light switch and illuminated the room.

  Two shrouded easels stood either side of the work under the provisional name Nirvana IV like the thieves on the crosses at Golgotha. Paul peered past the paintings into the recesses of the storage area. Nothing and no-one. Paul felt the creeping sensation and felt with certainty that, if he was to turn around, someone would be staring back at him. Paul whirled around, knocking the nearest easel causing it to crash to the ground with a clapperboard slap as the wooden panels came together.

  There was no-one there.

  Paul sighed. Dope and dreams. That and the weirdness of Weaver's reaching figure composed in the dead of night as he had slept nearby.

  He bent to pick up the fallen easel and noticed the shiny texture of Weave's pallet nearby. His eye noted the slickness of freshly smeared gouache and the recently used brush placed at its side. Paul looked up at Weaver's unfinished composition with wide eyes.

  *

  6

  Mary came out of the darkness of the tunnel first, followed by the unlikeliest of rescuers in the figure of John O' Connell. Weaver pushed at Collins forcing him into the resisting line of screamers. Mary mouthed something at him but he couldn’t make out her words. John-o ran to the edge of the circle and raised his fist. He paused before driving it into the back of an old man's head. Even in his current predicament, Weaver felt appalled at this act of violence towards an old man. The aged man fell forward unconscious providing a break in the human wall that was enough for Collins to thrust his upper body through before the ring could close again. The voices beat at his mind like persistent rain. His temples throbbed dully. He felt Weaver's weight pushing him forward through the hum
an bottleneck but he was crushed and walled in by flesh. Mary ran to him and grabbed his left forearm, O' Connell took the other. Together they pulled as Weaver pushed.

  Collins popped out of the crowd and Weaver followed. The whispering became a hissing multitude. Hands grabbed at them but they were weak, as Collins had realized earlier, exhausted to the point of uselessness. The two men pulled away from the searching hands easily. Come on, Mary mouthed and looked meaningfully at Weaver. He nodded at her in understanding. She turned away and ran to the tunnel entrance with John-o at her side. The policeman followed, Weaver in his wake.